The Pianist opens in the twilight of Warsaw in 1939, when the ambitious musician and composer performs on Polish radio. Like Focus Features' upcoming film, The Zookeeper’s Wife, it shows the capital city thriving with culture, but on the brink of war.

Entirely dedicated to his art, Szpilman lives in an upper-middle class intellectual bubble, buffered by a close, loving family. The affable young man’s focus is such that, when bombs begin to explode outside the radio studio, his fingers continue stroking the keys. Let the windows shatter and the walls crack, he's unwilling to stop in the middle of a musical movement that, to the artist, is more pressing than reality.

Szpilman learns that the power of music cannot overturn tanks, or ward off fascism, or the goose-step-march of history. What is a pianist without an instrument, or bread, or a safe attic in which to hide from the ovens of Auschwitz and elsewhere? This is a familiar arc of Holocaust movies: the belated realization that the Nazi regime will destroy the comforts of life, followed by inevitable betrayals and a downward spiral as the 1930s crumble into the war-ravaged 1940s.