Roman by Polanski (1984)

As a good American, I am genuinely torn about this whole thing with Roman Polanski. On the one hand, there's no doubt that he committed a crime, and a serious one at that, and arguably got away with it. But on the other hand I respect, admire, and love his movies so much (especially Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby, Chinatown, The Tenant, and at least two made after the crime, Bitter Moon and Death and the Maiden), and believe they are significant and important enough that I want very badly to look the other way. I'll own that because it's an awful lot of great movies from just one artist, two of which would likely never have been made if the mob outside with the torches and pitchforks had anything to say about it. (There's also the issue, which I note in passing, raised by William Faulkner on John Keats: “If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is worth any number of old ladies.”) Then there's the serious and generally underreported problem, explored at some length in the 2008 HBO documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, with the presiding judge in the case, who was removed from it for various ethical improprieties after Polanski had fled the country; they were not eccentric tics of interpretation, but serious breaches. Additionally, I think sexual predation of children is too often a grossly misunderstood crime, and certainly one abused on a regular basis in order to manipulate inflamed passions. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, because it does—and, in this particular case, did—but there are exceptions, which I sometimes think are probably more like the rule, and which in any event certainly mean that the extra mile always needs to be gone to not give the mob what it wants. All this said, Polanski's memoir adds still another level of complexity to the story by fleshing out the uniquely remarkable context of his life: his parents taken away by Nazis when he was just 5 years old, left at that age to fend for himself in the Polish countryside; as a youth, surviving and eventually escaping the oppressions of the Soviet-sphere Communist regime that followed World War II in Poland; and of course the well-known fate of his first wife Sharon Tate, who, two weeks short of giving birth to their first child, was slaughtered by the Manson group. More generally, Polanski's account contributes a lot to an understanding of the life that has shaped the sensibility that has driven an undeniably impressive body of work. So if tending toward a sense that splitting the difference here and just letting Polanski continue with his life and work as the best possible course of justice for everyone, all things considered, with Polanski simply required to endure the public approbation he has and certainly will from now on—if that makes me an apologist, then, well, I'm sorry.

In case it's not at the library.