How do we remember Roman Polanski?

AMERICA’S MOST WANTED | It’s difficult to put into words just how numbing the news of Roman Polanski’s arrest for a forty-year old warrant is. For one thing, how do you quantify guilt in this case?

Still from "Roman Polenski: Wanted"

Is it merely a question of the fitting punishment for a man who allegedly drugged and forced himself on a thirteen-year old girl? Or do you append to that his forty years on the lamb in France?

The Los Angeles prosecutors involved in the case have said time and again that no crime, especially one as heinous as the one perpetrated by Polanski, deserves to go unpunished no matter how famous the criminal, but this case can’t really be seen in terms of black/white or open/shut. It’s worth noting that the victim herself has come forward to say that she’d rather the case not go to trial to spare her and her family the inevitable media scrutiny that befalls anyone involved in a celebrity trial–scrutiny that, unfortunately, she has already become accustomed to. And what about Polanski himself? Here is a man whose brought to the screen some of the most memorable movies of the last sixty years–”Chinatown,” “Rosemary’s Baby”–and who recently won a Best Director Oscar in absentia for “The Pianist”–and yet the news of his arrest yesterday while en route to the Zurich Film Festival underscores the fact that he may only end up a criminal footnote in the annals of cinema history. Despite his accomplishments in Hollywood, Polanski, who himself was a victim of a vicious crime–the murder of his then-pregnant girlfriend Sharon Tate in 1969 by members of the Manson Family–could end up being most famous for his own victimizing acts and his subsequent flight from justice.

But is this fair? And if fair isn’t the right word, is this necessary? Or appropriate?

I’m not saying that this case isn’t worthy of being prosecuted. Nor am I saying that Roman Polanski necessarily deserves an extreme amount of clemency. All I’m hoping for is that the accomplishments of this man not be forgotten, because no matter what the outcome of this case, in the end Polanski’s place alongside some of the great directors of the 20th century, I think, is pretty much cemented. Let’s face it, he may not have been the most noble sonofabitch to come out of Hollywood–especially by way of France–but hopefully history will be able to separate it’s memories of Polanski the man from those of Polanski the artist.

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