Verdict: A stunning testament as well as a stunning movie.

By ELEANOR RINGEL GILLESPIE
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

What is included, though, is the TV featurette "Story of Survival." It contains details about Polanski's approach, comments from Brody about starving himself for the role and a few glimpses at the now-deceased Szpilman playing the piano.

At its best, "Survival" dips into archival footage to show how exact the vision in "The Pianist" is to reality. And Polanski talks about how rare and odd it is to have such an extensive visual record of ghetto life and that it was the Germans who filmed it. "When you watch it on the screen, you are trembling," he says, "and then you realize there is someone filming it. . . . It's difficult for me to understand. They were recording their 'masterpiece.' "

Surviving the Holocaust is one thing. Surviving being a survivor is another.

Roman Polanski, who was 7 when he escaped the Krakow ghetto, has, so far, survived. He's also survived a sex scandal that exiled him to Paris in the late '70s and a long career decline since such decades-old classics as "Chinatown," "Rosemary's Baby" and "Knife in the Water."

Perhaps he's proved to be more resilient because, instead of confronting the Holocaust directly (as did the others in their work), he channeled his dark ghosts into films about other things. Riddled with paranoia, horror, bleak gallows humor and a pervasive feeling of dread, his pictures are always awash with something that's gone terribly, terribly wrong -- be it Harrison Ford's missing wife in "Frantic" or John Huston's family values in "Chinatown."

With his splendid new film, "The Pianist," Polanski moves closer to his own World War II nightmare, but he filters it through someone else's survivor memoir: that of a well-known classical pianist named Wladyslaw Szpilman who published his "Death of a City" in 1946. Unburdened by the onslaught of commentary and hindsight that has emerged in the ensuing decades, the book is bluntly straightforward: Here's who I am. Here's what happened to me.

Polanski's film is similarly blunt. Though it's beautifully photographed, there's none of the trickier work we associate with his earlier films. Thus, the movie is often shockingly conventional, as if the director made a specific choice not to get in the way of Szpilman's story.

"The Pianist" is also, in a sense, existentially detached from the torments it portrays. Though the two films couldn't be more different, "The Pianist" is reminiscent of the lengthy documentary "Shoah" in that it, too, bears witness. That it does so so eloquently is a measure of Polanski's artistry, as well as that of his cast and his production team.

When Germany invades Poland in 1939, Szpilman (Adrien Brody, in a huge performance) is playing Chopin's Nocturne in D minor on the national public radio station in Warsaw. As the bombs fall, he continues to play -- until a bomb destroys the studio. Going home to his refined, upper-middle-class family, he finds them making plans to flee the Nazis. Then comes the announcement that France and Britain have declared war on Hitler. Spared from uprooting their lives, Szpilman's father says with considerable relief, "Didn't I tell you? All will be well."

All isn't. The Jews of Warsaw are incrementally dehumanized. One day, it's Star of David armbands and no public schools. The next, they are banned from parks, benches, even sidewalks (the implied metaphor of being reduced to the gutter would be ludicrously obvious, except that it actually happened).

Eventually all the Jews are herded together and marched into the infamous Warsaw ghetto. Waiting for them inside are overcrowded apartments, starvation, illness, corpse-littered streets. And the occasional on-a-whim execution by the Nazi soldiers. Worse is to come. The cattle cars arrive to take many of them to the concentration camps, which, at the time, were still not widely known as death camps. The Szpilman family is slated for deportation -- their "last supper" is a shared caramel candy -- but a momentary twist of fate separates Wladyslaw from them and from their inevitable fate.

Momentary twists of fate are the rule of the day for the rest of the movie. Inside the ghetto, Szpilman tries to join the underground freedom movement but is told that "musicians don't make good conspirators. They're too . . . musical." He eventually escapes (after almost being killed several times) and puts himself in the hands of a brave band of Poles who place him in one safe house after another -- often moving him mere minutes before the Nazis find him.

Ultimately, he's saved by his music. It's not just in what happens in the picture's penultimate twist of fate, but in the way the music in his head gives him a refuge from the surreal hell surrounding him. His fingers are constantly skittering over imaginary keys; when he runs down a flight of stairs, he still unconsciously protects his hands.

Brody doesn't play this man. He inhabits him. The actor shed 30 pounds from his thin frame to show Szpilman's emaciated physical state -- which, fittingly, echoes his emaciated emotional state. Szpilman's existence has been pared down to one thing: making it through the next hour, the next day, the next week. (Perhaps that's why the movie has a time-out-of-mind feeling; we don't know if he's been someplace a month or a year.) His response to the many people who help him is that of an animal. (Actually, Lassie was more appreciative.) There's no grace left in him, no gratitude, just a will to be.

Though the book is based on another's memoirs, some of the events depicted almost certainly were witnessed by Polanski himself. A little girl looking for her parents among the mass of deportees incongruously holds onto a lovely gilded bird cage. A starving man licks spilled soup off the street. An elderly man in a wheelchair is dropped off a fifth-floor balcony by the Nazis because he couldn't show proper deference by standing up.

Perhaps the movie's defining image is that of Szpilman walking alone through the massive burnt-out carcass that was once Warsaw. He could be the last man alive on Earth as he passes shattered remnants of buildings and rubble-strewn side streets.

Or perhaps he's like someone out of a Beckett play. That's part of the film's power. In creating his one-man epic, Polanski takes us beyond the horror of evil or the banality of evil. He takes us into its hideous absurdity.