About Schmidt The Pianist

...His movie chronicles the incremental horror that beset Poland's Jews after the Nazi conquest in late 1939...

...After the funeral, through a haze of grief, Schmidt takes stock...

...In an abandoned, half-ruined mansion, Szpilman is discovered by a German officer, who intuits he is a Jew, and asks his name and occupation...

...But not for long...

...If s one thing to get a muted, Everyman performance from Matthew Broderick...

...For almost half a century Roman Polanski has been blurring the line between the real and unreal...

...Now, in About Schmidt, Payne and his screenwriter, Jim Taylor, attempt the magic trick of Every-manizing none other than that icon of rebelliousness, Jack Nicholson...

...Bearded and gaunt, he has become a mumbling ghost, a madman sifting through the rubble for a tin of fruit...

...First the banishment from parks and restaurants, the advent of armbands, the forced removal to the ghetto...

...and yet we're drawn in by a steady force of sympathy for Warren himself and his need, however awkwardly, to do good...

...But on the verge of departure, Helen suffers a fatal stroke...

...Is About Schmidt a wicked satire, or a heartfelt rendering of a man so lonely, he reaches halfway across the globe for companionship...

...If s that subversive impulse again in Payne, giving us the running gag of Nicholson tamed donning half-lens specs and a loopy glasses strap to do the morning newspaper word jumble, or meekly obeying his wife Helen's dictum to sit while urinating, avoiding unseemly splashes...

...Now, in The Pianist, he takes on the subject directly...

...But sometimes what at first look passes for inspiration turns out to be just plain old incoherence...

...At least we're still together," Szpilman's mother whimpers, while shots and screams resound in the street outside...

...Payne indulges in sitting-duck comic potshots, like giving Warren's prospective son-in-law a horrifying haircut, or showing us his family eating like pigs at a trough...

...If s anything but a heartwarming occasion...

...a wife he barely knew...

...It is a stunning culmination, the film's accumulated claustrophobia and dread relieved by mercy, yet mercy in turn checked by the absurdity of survival, its pedigree of accidents and near misses...

...The movie had me shuddering to recall four long-ago years spent as a young high school English teacher, and my dread of one day becoming Matthew Broderick's doughy and downtrodden forty-year-old, stuck forever in the same routines and ideas, the same clothes...

...Election possessed an unusually ambiguous tone realism with an elusive satiric impulse that left us unsure whether these characters were being mocked by life itself, or merely by the director...

...Worst of all is the disastrous family Warren's daughter is about to marry into, a graceless mob of halfwits headed by Kathy Bates as a foul-mouthed virago...

...But, toward the end, Polanski puts his stamp on the material, lending it a sheen of the surreal...

...And through it all, the desperate rationalizations of victims whose only solace is self-delusion...

...The Pianist is a homecoming for Polanski, the first film he has made in Poland in four decades...

...Always the actuary, he recalculates his own life expectancy being a widower puts him in a different risk pool and arrives at a 73-percent chance of dying within nine years...

...death dealt out at whim...

...The Pianist rises from chronicle into art, and in so doing, recapitulates the formation of Polans-ki's sensibility itself beginning in the horrific facts of history, and ending in the tormented subjectivity of alienation and the absurd.on and the absurd...

...Schmidt writes a series of letters to the boy...

...a daughter he loved but rarely made time for...

...The film is based on the memoirs of Wla-dyslaw Szpilman, a brilliant young pianist and highly assimilated Polish Jew, who experienced the Nazi occupation in the Warsaw ghetto and unlike most survived to tell about it...

...It's true that a director can pull a surprising and precarious unity out of an argument with himself...

...By 1943 Szpilman's family has been shipped off to the death camps, while he, through a fortuitous intervention, is saved, hidden in a series of apartments by various sympathetic Poles...

...Recognizing beauty in the performance and humanity in the player, the German officer not only The mercy comes as a profound relief, and yet we can't escape knowing that only the man's whim has saved Szpilman's life and wondering what would have happened if Szpilman hadn't been able to play...

...hi retirement, Warren and Helen plan to travel in their new, gigantic Win-nebago...

...With its large cast and sets, and its straightforward narrative, the first two-thirds of The Pianist has the look and feel of a high-quality TV miniseries...

...What follows is an ironic and haunting variation on those earlier scenes in which Jews were forced to dance in the street, as this ghost of a man, his breath steaming in the winter cold, performs a spirited Chopin nocturne...

...voiced-over by Nicholson, they muse on his life and his dawning sense of its limitations: boring job and narrow horizons...

...Then casual sadism at the hands of German soldiers in the street, who humiliate starving Jews by making them dance at gunpoint...

...Channel-surfing one sleepless night, he catches an ad for an international charity, decides on an impulse to get involved, and ends up sponsoring a six-year-old African boy named Ndugu...

...Beneath this surface mockery lies the deeper absurdity of Nicholson's letters, offering avuncular advice to an impoverished East African six-year-old ("Remember this, young man you've got to appreciate what you have while you still have if), as his Winnebago whizzes past Midwestern fields of wheat and grain-fed cattle...

...In films such as Rosemary's Baby, The Tenant, and Repulsion, the surreal serves a floating state of dread that verges on psychosis, and a Kafkaesque vision rooted in the horror of atrocity...

...And finally scenes of unspeakable brutality: the degradations of starvation...

...About Schmidt (based loosely on the novel by Louis Begley) bears Payne's trademark mix of satire and sympathy, and it's even more pronounced than in Election...

...A good name for a pianist," the officer says in German, "Spielmann" literally means "player...

...The movie closes with a close-up of Nicholson in a spasm of grief and joy, weeping at an image of simple human connection contained in a child's stick-drawing...

...There's a lurking misanthropy in the film's treatment of the depredations of age merciless close-ups of Schmidt and his wife, their varicose veins and turkey-wattle necks and in the jabs Payne takes at idiocies all around, such as the fatuous attempts of the family minister to console Warren ("God can handle it if we're mad at him...

...SCREEN Rand Richards Cooper TRAPPED 'About Schmidt' & 'The Pianist Alexander Payne made a name for himself with Election, his wry study of a high school teacher's demolition by an aggressive, ambitious girl...

...At the film's outset, Nicholson's Warren Schmidt is retiring after decades of stoical service to the Woodmen Insurance Company, a gray obelisk of a building in a gray city (Omaha...

...Polanski escaped the Krakow ghetto in 1939 at age seven, and has made a lifetime of films informed implicitly by the Holocaust...

...people driven to madness, like a wailing woman who, it turns out, smothered her baby to prevent soldiers from discovering the family's hiding place...

...Perplexed, he heads out in the Winnebago on a mission to see what he has missed...

...What to do with his remaining time...

...A man so henpecked, his wife tells him how to pee...

...The moment is simultaneously moving and maudlin, making us wonder, is Payne mocking the redemption, or boosting it...

...The advice is so misplaced, it's grotesque...

...Payne's careful control contained undercurrents of something quietly subversive, and his film drifted interestingly between comedy and tragedy...

...Following the uprising and the destruction of the ghetto, Szpilman survives the final days of the war in the bombed-out city, foraging for something to eat amid a panorama of fantastic ruin...

...Locked-in and alone, he suffers agonies of helpless waiting...

...As the rather too-obvious pun announces, Schmidt himself is wooden: a man of habits so regular, he wakes in the morning two seconds before the alarm...

...The house happens to contain a piano, and the German orders Szpilman to "play something...