Schindler's List (1993)

reviewed by
Ralf Benner


                             SCHINDLER'S LIST
                       A film review by Ralf Benner
                        Copyright 1995 Ralf Benner

America's favorite director Steve Spielberg made in 1993 a movie no one thought he could. SCHINDLER'S LIST is not only unlike anything the artist has done before, there's a new level of maturity in his artistry, an intellectual ripeness and restraint that, permitting humility, exceed his own expectations. And certainly ours: had we not known who directed this emotional blockbuster, could we have correctly guessed? As Holocaust drama, we wait for the mandatory scenes--the roundup of Jews, the starvation and humiliations, the trains to Auschwitz, the gas chambers. They come, but not in the way we anticipate. Just as we're steeling ourselves against the coming horrors, there are interventions not only granting us reprieves but a few startlingly comic ones. Sometimes there are no stays of execution; we're made to watch a Nazi camp commandant use victims as if targets in a shooting gallery, or, in the one method used most, view random murders by graphic shots to the head. As the movie progresses, we realize that Oskar Schindler, a German Catholic manufacturer-raconteur, will at some point move beyond his calculated indifference, but what Spielberg keeps up unrelentingly is the terror of inconstancy--how, as one of the supporting characters tells, the rules by which one might believe he'll survive are forever changing. The only lifeline we have is the pre-knowledge that the story's about a reluctant hero: when Liam Neeson's Schindler breaks down over his guilt--a universal guilt--in not saving more Jews, there can not be a dry eye amongst non-Jews. I dare say, not even amongst adult deniers. Spielberg has worked over our emotions before, but as fantasy: people still get mushy and teary thinking of E.T. putting his arms around little Elliott--a sob-soaking happy farewell that satisfies our dreams for that visitor from another planet. Here in SCHINDLER'S LIST, Spielberg is at the apex of his directorial powers, and never more powerful than at the climax; when it's over, we're shattered. As if to one day address the doubters, Tennessee Williams once wrote that "truth is the only purification," and, with all deliberateness, it's now Spielberg's credo.

Opening and closing in color, the dramatic account of Oskar Schindler is in a newsreel-like black and white by Janusz Kaminski, who gives the images a state-of-the-art clarity as well as, at times, a relieving farawayness, the distance almost a safety factor for us, keeping us from overloading; at the same time he provides a very distinctively horrific film-noir effect, in fact, moves beyond it: the light and dark and shadows emphasize what the French critics used to describe 18th and 19th Century British Gothics as --"roman noirs." Spielberg insisted on non-color because all of his visual memories of the Holocaust came out of black and white news footage and documentaries. Excepting actual witnesses, his memories are ours, and though both Spielberg and Kaminski have admitted that they often could not bare to watch through the camera some of the scenes they were filming, their instincts about what they did film and how they did it seem guided by their higher powers: in their aversion, they have renewed the strength of black and white.

This achievement couldn't have come about without the magnificent production design, the real technical star of SCHINDLER'S LIST. In the reams of just praise being heaped on Spielberg, Kaminski, film editor Michael Kahn and screen adapter Steven Zaillian, there are few if any words about designer Alan Starski. His sets and real locales, street scenes and backgrounds provide the very basics for the movie's visual tone; without his selections' eerie rightness, we might have a production a little too perfectly constructed, looking a little too fresh to convince us. And while other Holocaust dramas have had characters react to the sickening sweet stench of burning flesh or have included glancing scenes of the belching smoke stacks, they've usually avoided the human ashfall that occurred. Not here: the ashfall is devastatingly beautiful in a most indescribably chilling way, and the coal conveyer used to dump the dead in gigantic pyres, which would burn for a week or more, is a surrealist's conception of a Wagnerian apocalypse.

When Spielberg's gone serious on us in the past, as in THE COLOR PURPLE and EMPIRE OF THE SUN, we detected the bogus. Exempting its spectacular Shanghai action sequence, EMPIRE OF THE SUN was so veneered with Fellini-like production values as juxtapositions that we were neither very sure what was going on nor cared; there was no emotional investment in the characters and, like his Neverland epics and most recently in JURASSIC PARK, Spielberg's energy and concentration felt dispersed in too many directions and he couldn't get all the elements to mesh. I fought my displeasure of his version of Alice Walker's novel due in large measure to the fact that I've never trusted writers whose books are letters to God. ("Are You Running With Me, Jesus?" comes to mind.) Compelling in its phoniness, THE COLOR PURPLE became episodic black soap, and Spielberg's clamoring for "respect" as movie maker and not as money maker never more obvious. You don't feel any pressure to defer to him in SCHINDLER'S LIST. Despite the message-ladened heaviness and his own well-publicized emotional tribulations while filming, Spielberg's a freer artist than we would have ever thought he could be, having for so long been held hostage to computers and story boards. Similar to Agnieszka Holland's EUROPA EUROPA, Spielberg de-cliches the Holocaust with wonderments of incongruity: Schindler flirting with candidates for typing jobs; Schindler openly kissing a Jewess in front of German military hierarchy; camp children hiding from death in outhouses, deep in excrement; dark blood gushing from heads onto snow; German soldiers listening in silent bewilderment to the chants of Jews at Shabbat services--a confirmation of the stories in the impacting VOICES FROM THE HOLOCAUST, in which survivors claim that regular German soldiers (as opposed to those of the S.S.) were if not sympathetic then tolerant and, if they wouldn't be caught, agreeable to a conspiracy of escape. What makes all of this and so much more a continual jaw-dropper is that while we're aware Spielberg speeded up production to meet a Christmas release date, there's no sense of rush; the pacing is luxuriant.

Much praise has been heaped on Ben Kingsley as accountant Itzhak Stern--especially by the Jewish members of the audience--that I think it's almost a reflex response, and understandably prejudicial. He's masterfully understated, even when he looks like author-AIDS activist Larry Kramer, but objectively, his character as victim-survivor is pre-packaged; he's not bringing anything new to Spielberg's vision. Englishman Ralph Fiennes as Amon Goeth, the commandant of the concentration camp, doesn't bring much that's fresh, either, in that Spielberg emblemizes all of his hated Nazis. He's extremely watchable however: he revives in memory portions of Marlon Brando in THE YOUNG LIONS, and Lee Harvey Oswald too, and there's a touch of Oskar Werner in his voice. The real adhesive, though, is Liam Neeson. His face looking oddly broad and flattened, in what I've read is a Spielberg-inspired genuflection to late Time-Warner chieftain Steve Ross, with a subtle pancakey quality of the Joker, Neeson at first seems rather like a Bela Lugosi as the Phantom from the Cabaret, and absolutely fitting--the blood of his own humanity having already been transfused to God only knows where. In silk suits, drinking premium booze as fortification, Neeson's faithful to the real Schindler, for he was womanizer, unrepentant hedonist, fallen Catholic, and (questionably) apolitical as a means of survival. And he wasn't above using forced Jewish labor as means of enriching himself financially or taking up residence in a previously Jewish-owned home. (In real life, Schindler made attempts to find the original owners to pay them for it; Robert Mitchum's Pug in THE WINDS OF WAR also did.) It's also true that for Schindler, as with so many, the lives of a few Jews were expendable in the name of wider German glory, war having a price that, he bemoans in the movie, brings out the very worst in people. It isn't until Schindler sees the merciless destruction of Jewish ghettos in Poland that he begins to realize that eliminating all Jews isn't "just good old Jew-hating talk, it's official policy." When he's approached by a daughter of two elder Jews who face death and she begs him to take them into his factory "haven," he's at first infuriated that, one, his own business is regarded as such, and two, that it's true: his business is indeed serviced by those without skills, being used by Kingsley to keep selected Jews alive. Realizing that his own country is determined to annihilate the Jews, his insouciance changes. But not his demeanor of Germanic pride; it's still arrogant, still crafty, and he uses it as a means to stall or stop the Nazis from killing people he's determined to save. As we watch him wield his considerable persuasion, we perceive that the Nazis he's bargaining with secretly admire him, though they nor we are sure why. From THE GOOD MOTHER onward, Neeson has steadily climbed towards the top of the list of actors who have become so sexually magnetic that critics--especially John Lahr of The New Yorker, in reviewing the Broadway revival of ANNA CHRISTIE--have compared him to the Brando of A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE. Vanity Fair calls him The Liam King. The fiery animalism these writers suggest hasn't yet reached the screen (neither in ETHAN FROME nor ROB ROY), though none of us who've watched and admired him doubt it's coming. As Schindler, Neeson, sometimes with one eye in shadow, extinguishes the potential heat of this appeal and instead is rather grotesque, even pallid with his snob appetites. His Germanic showmanship has an Isherwood doominess, and while it's off-putting to our sensibilities at the beginning, it's immediately spellbinding, and stays that way and grows on us right to the finale.

Not everything is topnotch: the daughter pleading to Schindler to save her aging folks gets to see her audacity rewarded in a setup that's just too neat; the little orphan in the muted red coat--homage to the famous image in FORBIDDEN GAMES--is regrettably a cheap expectation; the death of Amon Goeth lacks sting, as if it's an after-thought, when what we need to feel is the resonance of retribution. There's a twinge of criticism to offer that after the climax, Spielberg didn't know how to end his movie, because he keeps tagging on additional bits. The movie seems to really want to end as we watch Neeson in his car, exiting the factory-camp. In that we're barely able to recover, these add-ons were designed for that very purpose--to give us a chance to collect our disheveled, sobbing selves. And, naturally, to honor Schindler. It's above reproach morally, but it might have been more effective had Spielberg run the credits while we watch the surviving Schindlerjuden put the stones on his grave. (In many respects, Schindler is Judas in reverse: earning praise from others for saving Jews, he earned the enmity of some Germans: Writes Keneally, "He was hissed on the streets of Frankfurt, stones were thrown, a group of workmen jeered at him and called out that he ought to have been burned with the Jews." Contemplating Judas's demise, Schindler said, "I would kill myself--if it wouldn't give them so much satisfaction." He died October 9, 1974, in Frankfurt, from advanced hardening of the arteries of the brain and heart.)

The utter madness of critics' associations honoring SCHINDLER'S LIST as best picture but denying its director has method--to enrage Hollywood to feel compelled to finally honor Spielberg outright. Besides, if you've made both the biggest moneymaker of all time and SCHINDLER'S LIST in the same year, aren't you hands down the year's best moviemaker? Hollywood likes to keep its eye on the headlines, too. With some 20% of Americans willing to entertain the inconceivable--that the Holocaust never happened--and with Bosnia a nightly news reminder of "ethnic cleansing," Spielberg becomes the movies' Elie Wiesel. SCHINDLER'S LIST is a purifying bris--pulling back the foreskin of mounting indifference, cutting away the shameful neglect of Kingsley holds up the sheet with the names of those Neeson will pay to save, he says, "The list is life." Translated into Hollywoodspeak, those glorious four words mean, "And the winner is..."

--
RalfBenner@aol.com

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