SCHINDLER'S LIST
A film review by Richard Montanari
Copyright 1993 Richard Montanari
A review of SCHINDLER'S LIST by Richard Montanari, film critic for THE FREE TIMES.
One Candle, One Sun
To say that Schindler's List is the most powerful dramatic film ever made about the Holocaust is not to say that it will, or should, supplant Jan Kadar's 1964 Oscar-winning masterpiece THE SHOP ON MAIN STREET, or documentaries such as SHOAH and THE SORROW AND THE PITY as the ultimate indictment against Nazism and its crimes against European Jewry.
But rather it may serve to overlook the true significance of the film: that being the huge step toward greatness it represents for director Steven Spielberg.
The three-hour film, based on the true story recounted in Thomas Keneally's 1982 book of the same name, chronicles the war for Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson); hustler of powerful men, seducer of beautiful women, an industrialist who needed only one thing to fully flesh out his marginal business acumen: a nice long war.
The story begins as seductively as the horror, with Schindler hustling an entire cafe full of Nazi officers and their women, eventually securing the connections he needs to open a factory in occupied Poland. At the beginning of the war Oskar Schindler was a glad-handing Nazi war profiteer; charming and reasonable, a string quartet outside a death camp.
Soon, Schindler moves to Krakow with the intent of launching his enamelware factory with Jewish money, hiring Jewish workers at slave wages and retiring at the end of the war a millionaire. But Schindler, whose concepts of war and business had always been conveniently similar, did not plan on standing witness to genocide. Like Kadar's Tono Britko, Oskar Schindler was a man in moral turmoil.
The film was shot in Poland and other authentic locations in black and white, except for a solitary sequence where a little Jewish girl runs through the streets of the Krakow ghetto in a red coat. At times, during SCHINDLER'S LIST, it is easy to forget that you are not watching a documentary; the realities are that heightened, the barbarity, that graphic and wrenching.
Liam Neeson gives an extraordinary, measured performance as the enigmatic Schindler; as does Ben Kingsley as Itzhak Stern, the Jewish accountant who becomes Schindler's business and, ultimately, his conscience.
Yet, in this telling, the very heart of Nazism--the notion that real might is not just the power to kill, but the power to kill arbitrarily--is embodied in one man, Amon Goeth, the monster of Plaszow. As Goeth, British actor Ralph Fiennes moves with frightening ease from beleaguered administrator to wild animal. The scenes of Goeth casually shooting slow-moving Jews from his balcony, then turning back to his lover are some of the most stunning glimpses of evil ever put on film. Fiennes will surely be nominated for Best Supporting Actor for this performance.
But there are so many other numbing moments on which Spielberg, in conveying the enormity of the horror, thankfully does not linger; the image of Jewish women using their own blood to put color in their cheeks and lips, hoping to convey a healthy appearance; the image of the five-year-old-boy hiding in a latrine, waist-deep in feces; the sound of Itzhak Perlman's anguished violin, a muted plea on an empty street.
By the end of the war, Schindler's list--the roster of more than a thousand Jewish names that Schindler and Stern compiled as "essential munitions workers," hence saving them from all but certain annihilation--serves as a small flame of humanity amid such monstrous inhumanity. In the realm of the soul, Schindler's list was the ultimate wartime requisition.
While Spielberg's first two attempts at "mature themes," THE COLOR PURPLE and EMPIRE OF THE SUN, fell short of expectations, this astoundingly explicit and moving film should proclaim that America's most successful director has become one of America's great directors and, in one impassioned gesture, has crossed a line of innocence from which he will never fully return.
You will not soon forget the little girl in the red coat, nor the naked, brutal majesty of Steven Spielberg's SCHINDLER'S LIST.
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SCHINDLER'S LIST: A
c.1993 Richard Montanari CIS: 73112,3705 InterNet: am074@cleveland.freenet.edu
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