DIRECTOR: Steven Spielberg
CAST:
Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley, Ralph Fiennes, Embeth Davidtz, Caroline Goodall
REVIEW:
Oskar Schindler was an unlikely hero. German businessman and war profiteer, womanizer, slave laborer, and a member of the Nazi Party with prominent friends within the SS, he happily moved in on the heels of the conquering German Army and set up a cookware factory in occupied Krakow, ruthlessly taking advantage of cheap Polish-Jewish labor in the service of the Third Reich. Yet coming into such close contact with Jews at a time when his own government was implementing plans for their total annihilation seems to have lit a spark of humanity within the coldly opportunistic Schindler, and by the time Krakow and the rest of Europe was released from Nazi domination in 1945, he had bankrupted himself and his factory and endured repeated arrests by the Gestapo to bring over 1,000 Polish Jews safely through the war and the simultaneously blazing Holocaust. This German war profiteer and nominal Nazi had saved more Jews than any other individual. And yet, for decades afterwards, his story, and theirs, remained largely untold. In October 1980, author Thomas Keneally was on his way home to Australia after a book signing when he stopped en route to the airport to buy a new briefcase in a Beverly Hills luggage shop owned by Leopold Pfefferberg- one of the 1200 “Schindlerjuden”, Jews who had been saved by Schindler. In the 50 minutes Keneally spent waiting for his credit card payment to clear, Pfefferberg persuaded him to go to the back room where the shopkeeper kept two cabinets filled with documents he had collected. Pfefferberg - who had told his story to every writer and producer who ever came into his store - eventually wore down Keneally's reluctance, and the writer chose to make the story into his next book. Martin Scorsese had the chance to translate book to film in the 1980s, but felt he could not do as good of a job as a Jewish director. Then came Steven Spielberg, who began work on Schindler’s List in Poland while finishing post-production for his infinitely different hit of the same year, Jurassic Park, via satellite. Thus did the little known story of Oskar Schindler and his Schindlerjuden finally receive the attention it deserved.
Krakow, 1939: The smooth-talking German businessman and opportunist Oskar Schindler (Irish actor Liam Neeson in an Oscar-nominated performance) arrives in the newly occupied Polish city. After a short time we see that he is not as wealthy and well-connected as he seems, and gets his expensive clothes and fine foods off the black market, but he is a tall, handsome, suave man who masks his lack of any real abilities or means beneath a dashing exterior, sweeping grandly into SS-frequented nightclubs, always dressed in the finest suits, and ingratiating himself with them and their girlfriends so quickly, showering them with the finest foods, wines, and cigars, that by the time anyone thinks to ask who this man is, he has already charmed them all so thoroughly that it doesn’t even matter. He knows nothing of cookware, nor of financially managing a business, and for the second part he turns to Jewish accountant Itzhak Stern (a low-key but solid Ben Kingsley), who runs his business and recruits Jewish workers from around the Krakow Ghetto, forging their papers to convince the Nazis that they are skilled workers and therefore worth more alive than dead. These workers are quickly taught the basics, and Deutsche Emailwarenfabrik is opened, converted to manufacture shell casings and etc. for the German Army. For a time, Schindler is happy enough to fill his own coffers and does not appear to question- or at least shoves to the back of his mind- the fate of his workers. But as the war, and the Holocaust, progresses, with “his” Jews increasingly victimized by the Nazis, and especially with the arrival of the brutal Kommandant Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes), Schindler begins to find it more difficult to ignore the suffering of the people who have brought him his success.
The gradual transformation which leads greedy slave labor profiteer Oskar Schindler to deliberately run his factory at a loss to bring more and more Jews into his protection is the backbone of the film, and is made all the more effective by the fact that the filmmakers do not pretend to know exactly when his lust for money was overridden by a genuine concern for the lives of the workers. Rather than guessing at the specific reason or moment, Schindler’s conversion is portrayed as a gradual awakening of dormant human feelings, although his witnessing of Goeth’s “liquidation” of the Krakow Ghetto is shown as a pivotal event. While he is certainly regarded as a heroic figure today, and deservedly so, the film does not shy away from his numerous character flaws, highlighted in a scene where a Jewish family is evicted and Schindler immediately moves in, ignoring the streets filled with displaced Jews, and another where his wife Emilie (Caroline Goodall) arrives and then leaves again after Oskar will not promise to end his womanizing. His initial selfishness is demonstrated with harsh clarity when he narrowly rescues Stern from deportation and then complains “what if I’d got here five minutes later, then where would I be?” It obviously does not occur to him to think of where Stern would be. That Schindler can transform convincingly from a slimy opportunist to a selfless savior is a tribute both to the filmmakers and to Liam Neeson, who handle the transition subtly and gradually and make the character change work.
One thing that sets Schindler's List apart from many other Holocaust films such as The Pianist, which focus strictly on Jewish characters, is that, in addition to having a German Gentile as the central figure, it shows the viewpoint not only of the Jews, but also of the Nazis, represented chiefly by Amon Goeth, played by the darkly intense British actor Ralph Fiennes in the film’s second Oscar-nominated performance. The scene where he stands on his balcony with a rifle and casually picks off random workers will not soon be forgotten by anyone who sees it. At the same time, he selects a young Jewish woman, Helen Hirsch (Embeth Davidtz) as his maid, and inexplicably finds himself simultaneously attracted to her and revolted by his own feelings. Schindler's List is a very watchable and engrossing film throughout, but it is kicked up a notch even further when Ralph Fiennes appears; Fiennes is chilling and mesmerizing in this performance. Playing a role like this without going over-the-top is a careful balance, and Fiennes nails it perfectly, suggesting that Goeth is a little unhinged without coming across as just a one-dimensional Nazi maniac. He's a repulsive person, but he's still a fully-fleshed out and three-dimensional person, and from time to time he even surprises us with a flicker of humanity. I applaud Spielberg for portraying the Nazi villain with some depth, it makes it all more realistic and thus more frightening.
Ben Kingsley's role as the Jewish accountant Stern is not nearly as flashy or attention-getting as that of Neeson or Fiennes, but he provides a solid dramatic anchor and comes across as a sort of unsung hero in the shadow of Schindler, a quiet and unassuming man who is initially repulsed by this flamboyant, greedy German with whom he is forced to associate, but uses his position to do all he can for his fellow Jews, at first under Schindler's nose but ultimately serving as his conscience, subtly goading him to take one more humanitarian step. Embeth Davidtz as Helen, the Jewish maid who must endure both Goeth's brutality and his sinister advances, is very convincing as a woman living in constant terror. The film is uniformly well-acted, even down to the small roles, and overall the entire production feels very realistic.
Filmed in stark black and white which seems appropriate to the grim solemnity of the story, Schindler’s List pulls no punches when it comes to portraying graphic violence. The piles of corpses are an impressive and horrible spectacle, but the epic miniseries War and Remembrance was littered throughout with images like this, and the potentially more disturbing scenes are those of single individual murders, complete with blood spurting from heads and chests. But however gruesome the violence gets here, nothing can top the horrific gassing scene in War and Remembrance, the 1988 television miniseries which, for all of its love story soap opera, did an incredible job in depicting the Holocaust. No one is gassed onscreen in Schindler's List, and Auschwitz makes only a chilling cameo. There is even a little- not much, but a little- comic relief, mostly involving the sequence in which the womanizing Schindler tries to choose a secretary; he ignores the best typist, a chubby, middle-aged woman, while fawning over younger and prettier candidates, ultimately unable to pick just one and ending up with a small army of attractive young secretaries. Some have complained that the film focuses on Schindler and the other German characters, leaving the Jews with the exception of Stern and Helen mostly faceless and relegated to the background. That argument may have some merit, but there is a consistent supporting cast of Jewish workers who appear throughout the film with their own stories, although it may take a few viewings to keep track of each individual. A brief visit to Auschwitz is a masterpiece of atmosphere, filming the infamous death camp in heavy snow, the darkness lit by the fire belching from its always billowing chimney, the searchlight silhouetting the shadowy figures of the Nazi guards. We only see it for a few minutes, but Spielberg coats Auschwitz in a sense of deep, nightmarish dread.
As Schindler comes to realize the immense evil taking place around him, Neeson subtly adds a barely perceptible mental weight to his shoulders and a tinge of sadness to his eyes. By the end, all the money he amassed with his factory has lost any meaning for him, and he throws it all away to bring every last person he possibly can through the war alive. At the climax, he is shattered and racked with guilt by his obsession with wondering what more he could have done, what he could have sold, to save just one more human being from the jaws of death. Ben Kingsley is extremely subtle as Stern, and we aren’t completely sure when he changes his opinion of Schindler, but as he points out at the end, “there will be generations because of you.” Schindler always thought he could have done more, but today the descendants of those on his list outnumber the entire Jewish population of Poland. Ending text informs us that Amon Goeth was executed for crimes against humanity after the war, that Schindler failed at his marriage and several subsequent businesses, and that upon his death he was buried in Jerusalem, where he is honored as a Righteous Gentile. Bottom line: Either as a study of the Holocaust or the story of one man’s redemption, Schindler’s List is a powerful, haunting, but ultimately emotionally uplifting film.
