HOLOCAUST TALE PLAYS OUT IN 'THE PIANIST'.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

`THE PIANIST'' feels both staged and vividly naturalistic. Normally that would not be the highest praise one could give a movie - and even less so for one about a subject as important and sensitive to presentation as the Holocaust.

But it is a most right and honest way to go with this particular film, and certainly for its director, Roman Polanski. As a Jewish child, he somehow managed to survive the German occupation of Poland. And as an adult filmmaker, Polanski has repeatedly displayed a peculiar knack for expressing the conflict of watching, helplessly and often from a vantage point the observer cannot leave.

With ``The Pianist,'' the true-life story of Wladyslaw Szpilman (based on the musician's autobiography), Polanski has found the perfect material with which to address his own World War II experience in his signature style. Rising to the occasion after some decades wandering in the cinematic wilderness, the filmmaker serves both history and his artistic integrity well.

Filmed in Poland and Germany, and in English, the picture follows a presentational strategy (and a plot point or two) similar to sister Polish director Agnieszka Holland's ``Europa Europa'': Everything we see is via the direct experience of the survivor, in this case played with persuasive, tamped-down incredulity by American actor Adrien Brody. But whereas Holland's true tale of a young Jewish man outlasting the Nazis seemed awfully tall in places, the recessiveness of Polanski's approach makes for a much more convincing case. How could someone possibly avoid disappearing in the terror without almost disappearing from it? ``The Pianist'' finds heroism in the most sensible act of bravery an individual could commit under the circumstances. It's an ode to the courage that it takes to hide.

The war begins for Szpilman as he's doing what he loves best - playing Chopin. In this instance it's at a Warsaw radio station, until German bombs blast him out of the studio. Wlad makes it back to the elegant apartment he shares with his parents, his hotheaded brother and two strong-willed sisters. They are encouraged by radio reports that France and Britain have declared war on Germany. They are doomed.

The Nazis' anti-Jewish actions are detailed as they have been in many other films. But as the Szpilmans gradually lose their rights, home, possessions and hope, Polanski does what few other filmmakers have. Sticking, apparently, to the tone of Szpilman's book, which was written shortly after liberation in an objective style, the movie's script (credited to ``The Dresser's'' Ronald Harwood, with much undisputed input from the director) catalogs the horrors, absurdities and day-to-day details of life in the Warsaw Ghetto in an unemphatic, matter-of-fact way. While never becoming too detached, Polanski adroitly sidesteps melodramatic excess at every turn.

Thus we see a horrific Gestapo raid on a building across the street from the Szpilmans' darkened tenement window, juxtaposed soon after by the unexpected sight of Wlad playing piano at a nicely appointed restaurant for well-dressed Jewish collaborators and black marketeers. Dozens upon dozens of other deftly dramatized moments add up to as complete a portrait of the complex Ghetto life as has ever been re-created for the screen.

Of course, even this dire existence does not last, and it is through the brutal kindness of one of those collaborators that Wlad is not transported to a death camp (he, and we, get a final glimpse of his relatives as the boxcar doors shut). He manages to hook up with a labor gang of Warsaw's remaining Jews and even does his bit to smuggle in arms for a planned Ghetto uprising. But as one comrade notes, musicians don't make good conspirators, and Szpilman gets himself smuggled out of the Ghetto in the proverbial nick of time.

It is at this point that the Polanski of ``Repulsion,'' ``Rosemary's Baby'' and ``The Tenant'' unapologetically asserts his authority. The Polish Underground sets Szpilman up in a series of safe houses - which, of course, he cannot leave - that just happen to overlook, first, a Ghetto wall through which the Germans put down the 1943 Jewish rebellion, and then an SS station and military hospital that is targeted during the general revolt of 1944. Unable to warn, help, escape or, in one exquisitely torturous bit, play a piano that sits in one of the rooms where he must quietly reside, Szpilman has to marshal all of his strength just to continue breathing.

And when he finally does get out, the struggle is far from over.

History buffs may feel a bit cheated by the absence of elements that Szpilman doesn't see. For example, ``The Pianist'' never notes that the disastrous '44 uprising, so harrowingly depicted in Andrzej Wajda's ``Kanal,'' was a result of the Soviet army's cynical decision to halt its advance within sight of the city, leaving the Nazis time to do the dirty work of wiping out armed Polish partisans.

Additionally, those conditioned to standard forms of movie narrative may lose patience with a protagonist as passive as Szpilman. It's not a reaction to be ashamed of, but it is one that misses the whole point of ``The Pianist'': To watch voicelessly as the world goes mad in order to reclaim your voice another day is to put up a damnably good fight.

THE PIANIST - Three and one half stars

(R: violence, intolerance, language)

Starring: Adrien Brody, Thomas Kretschmann, Frank Finlay, Maureen Lipman.

Director: Roman Polanski.

Running time: 2 hr. 28 min.

Playing: Century Plaza, Century City.

In a nutshell: Holocaust survivor Polanski films the survival story of a fellow Polish Jew, musician Wladyslaw Szpilman, with a combination of bracing, objective naturalism and his own signature understanding of what it's like to observe madness in trapped, helpless silence.