SCHINDLER'S LIST
A film review by John Locke
Copyright 1994 John Locke
This film has gotten plenty of praise, some of it deserved. Here's another side.
The fundamental problem is that the stories of thousands (or millions) of people are very appropriate to documentary filmmaking, but not to dramatic filmmaking. It's the intimate knowledge of a few characters that makes empathy personal and not intellectual. SCHINDLER'S LIST gives us an intimate look at a few characters but there are problems with all of these.
First, Schindler himself. He is not a Jew or a prisoner, so from a historical perspective, he is not a central character in the holocaust, merely an interesting sidelight. The choice of putting him at the center of the story reminds me of films like SALVADOR, where El Salvador's history is reduced to the experiences in an American journalist's life, or CRY FREEDOM! which is a biography of Stephen Biko, but makes a white journalist the central character. In all cases, I think the technique is a cop-out to market forces--the largest percentile of the audience is given a character they are more likely to relate to culturally. It is not simply a matter--with SCHINDLER'S LIST--of choosing to tell the Schindler story. A Jew could have been central while Schindler was made subsidiary. The holocaust could have been the foreground and Schindler's factory the background, rather than the other way around.
(A television movie, PLAYING FOR TIME, makes better artistic choices in how the holocaust is portrayed. First, the characters are prisoners and central to the event. At the same time, their recruitment into a camp orchestra gives them a plausible reason for staying around longer than the average prisoner, and experiencing the camp both as a prisoner and with the broader perspective of a long-term inmate.)
So who are the central Jewish characters? Stern, the factory accountant, is the main one. But he has a disembodied life--no background we know of, no family, no passions. He gives up little of himself and hence engenders too little sympathy. Worse still, he is spared from the horrors of the holocaust, other than witnessing them. So he is not at the heart of the matter. How about the camp commandant's Jewish housekeeper. She is closer but, yet, she rarely speaks so we never get to know her except as She Who Suffers in Silence. After her, it's all cameos: the woman engineer who wants to make a good barracks, the hinge-maker, the worker who wants to thank Schindler, etc. These characters come on to illustrate individual points and then leave, but we never know them as individuals. After them, there are simply masses of people running around with rabbit-like fear.
The lack of strong developed Jewish characters, ironically, tends to makes us think more like the guards of the prisoners than their saviors. A guard may be shocked at first by the violence he witnesses but becomes used to it because he doesn't know the people and they are never allowed to speak and become human. It's knowing enough about the characters to care about them as individuals that prevents us from seeing them as unfortunate sheep.
Sadly, the most vivid character is the psychopathic commandant. He is so outrageous and unpredictable he steals all the scenes he is in. What crazy thing will this lunatic do next? Is he central to the holocaust? Yes, in a perverse way, but I think we would all agree that the major theme of the holocaust is suffering, not sadism.
For anyone who has seen documentaries or photographs of the holocaust, the visual impact of the film is greatly diminished. SCHINDLER'S LIST is a grim tour through a holocaust museum, but without the insights of empathetic characters, it doesn't go far enough beyond the historical record.
Putting all that aside, Schindler *is* an interesting character, but in a subtle way. His behavior doesn't really change over the course of the film--he starts off running a factory and ends up running a factory. It's his motivations, his reasons for running a factory that change, and the change takes place over a protracted period. That should be enough, but subtlety is apparently anathema to Spielberg. He can't resist tacking on an emotional wallop to the end of the story, wherein Schindler breaks down pitifully in regrets that he couldn't have saved one more Jew with the sale of some jewelry or ten more with the sale of his car. It's an outrageous sob sell-out on Spielberg's part. Schindler's breakdown lacks common sense--he's already done so much obvious good. The breakdown doesn't appear to be in character at all. Furthermore, it's not plausible that Schindler even thinks that way--he's an entrepreneur, not an accountant; he thinks on a grander scale rather than a smaller. (Note that the breakdown is Spielberg's invention; it's not in the book.)
Still, it's an interesting film, better than most. It will garner many awards, as much for its intentions as its artistry. I give it a $5.50 out of $7.00.
John
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