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I'm sure you've heard that "The Pianist" won just about every awardpossible last year, save the Oscar for Best Picture—a trophy it richly deserved,but in a what-are-you-thinking moment that Academy voters specialize in, theHolocaust lost out to that other period of great suffering, Prohibition. Ormore precisely, the two hours it took to sit through "Chicago."

Never mind the mock terror of watching Richard Gere in tap shoes—"The Pianist,"at times, features an almost Lovecraftian kind of dread. This is a movie aboutbeing on the run, about hiding-surviving. The first half is what you would expectfrom a film set in Poland during WWII: musician Wladyslaw Szpilman and his familyare affluent Jews in Warsaw during the Nazi occupation. They suffer indignitiesescalating from not being allowed into cafes to being evicted and forced intothe ghetto, work camps, and finally onto that inevitable train to nowhere.

Aided by a friend at the train station, Szpilman escapes the concentration camps,but like a character in a Sartre play, he soon finds that there's really nowhereto escape to. There is no better illustration of this than a shot late in thefilm, when Szpilman flees a hospital and winds up on a main thoroughfare. Forthe first time, he sees what has become of his city-the maniacs, they've blownit up, and like old Charlton Moses himself, he's the Omega Hebrew. This is whereAdrien Brody earns his Oscar. He is astonishing, totally committing himselfto an almost completely wordless performance that relies largely on the physicaldeterioration of someone starving and completely alone.

Holocaust stuff is tricky material. In the hands of a filmmaker like Senor Spielbergothe historical gets histrionic. Nazis bad? No kidding. We all know what theGermans did to the Jews, but here, director Roman Polanski doesn't caricaturetheir nihilism. He presents it point blank (literally, in more than one scene),allowing us to summon emotions on our own—no need to colorize a little deadgirl or have John Williams pull the heartstring section.

Polanski didn't just direct "The Pianist"—he lived it. And not justbecause he grew up in Nazi occupied Poland like Szpilman, on whose memoir thefilm is based. No, Polanski's entire life has been an existential horror show:his pregnant mother died in a gas chamber at Auschwitz. His pregnant wife, SharonTate, was murdered by the Manson family. And then there's that whole fleeingthe country after having sex with a minor deal. It's hard to blame him for choosingFrance over prison, though I'm not quite sure which has nicer bathrooms.

Even if you deplore Polanski's actions (despising rapists comes easily to mostpeople), the extra features on the disc help put his pathology into perspective.The prerequisite "Making-Of" featurette goes way beyond the kind ofB-roll fluff that most studios cake onto their DVD releases. It features Polanskitelling his own story while he details how he re-created his experiences forthe film. Truly frightening stuff, and like the film, he leaves himself openfor you to judge.