Overall Rating
  Awesome: 80.75%
Worth A Look: 5.63%
Average: 2.82%
Pretty Bad: 7.98%
Total Crap: 2.82%
4 reviews, 189 user ratings
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| Schindler's List |
by MP Bartley
"Take a deep breath, watch, learn and never forget."
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It's so easy to sneer at 'Schindler's List' and be a contrarian. "It only won Oscars because it's about the Holocaust". "It's only rated because it's Spielberg being important in black and white". I'm not childish enough to sit here and deride people who don't like 'Schindler's List' as 'Nazis'. I'm just thankful that this film exists. And for those contrarians who just turn their noses up at it (and I've yet to read a valid criticism of it - they all smack of being contrary for the sake of it), I just feel sorry that you can't get from it what the rest of us can. Education.Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson) is a German industrialist and casual womaniser, who is using cheap Jewish labour in Poland in the hope of making his millions from war profiteering. He's also a Nazi. His business runs into trouble however when the Nazis begin to implement the Holocaust, and his cheap labour is rounded up and deported to a labour camp under the baleful eye of Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes). Schindler bribes Goeth at first to release the Jews to him, because he needs the cheap labour and he's fast approaching bankruptcy without them, particularly his pin-sharp accountant Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley). But something else is stirring inside Schindler, a feeling that he should be doing more. Something not designed solely for profit. Something human.
Oh my. Where to start? What about Steve Zallian's script taking a mammoth book, a complex time structure and story, an ambiguous individual we will probably never fully understand, and condensing it into a 3 hour epic that skirts that fine line between depressing and uplifting, that never loses focus and is resolutely, almost angrily purposeful?
How about Janusz Kaminski's startling, rich, evocative black and white cinematography? He captures haunting and terrifying images that we've only seen in photos or newsreels in a bleak documentary style, that alternately sickens and entrances with it's cold and awful beauty. The red is drained from the blood that washes over the screen, draining it of its tendency to be over-the-top or garish, and instead rendering it in a numbing, simple authenticity that gives it the horrifying true life feel.
We see images that we never thought we would ever see in a non-documentary film. A Jewish woman is shot through the head for telling the Nazis that the structure they are building in the camp, will collapse and that it needs to be rebuilt. And then they rebuild it anyway. Goeth takes potshots at Jewish children from his balcony because he feels like it. Thousands of bodies are burned in an open field with the ash settling on everything for miles around. And as a one armed man is pulled from a crowd and shot, the camera doesn't flinch as it stares at the hole in his forehead and watches the blood seep out and stain the surrounding snow.
And all by the man who directed 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind'.
This film will fuck you up in the head. It will kick you in the stomach and not stop until you can't take anymore. It will twist your finger and force you to open your eyes and take in things you would hope to never see in your whole life. It will make you cry, but not through easy sentimentality, but through anger and horror that this whole period existed in a time that our own grandparents will remember.
But it isn't shameless or exploitative, it's all done with a finely tuned intelligence, a raging injustice and a dose of compassion that never falls into sentimentality. And this is all down to Spielberg. This is Spielberg at his most self-contained, at his most potent and using his powers as a supreme storyteller and an astonishing visualist to their fullest effect. Still think Spielberg's over-rated? Go away, I don't think I want to know you anymore.
The story isn't lost in the visuals as some critics claim, the story informs and becomes the visuals. Children hiding in shit, Nazis using stethoscopes to listen for people hiding behind walls, a factory worker discovering that the only thing more terrifying than a loaded gun, is a loaded gun that keeps jamming...these are things we've only read about with a shudder. And Spielberg brings them to life, with not a trace of sensationalism, but with a cool, calm and collected grace. With an unblinking eye that captures the most horrific period of the last century without ever losing control of his reigned in emotions. Spielberg uses every talent he has at his disposal, but he never shows it. He just shrinks back behind his lens until he's just as much an observer as we are.
And a magnificent cast carry every weight of this film on their shoulders without ever delving into cheap tricks or histrionics. Neeson (shamefully denied an Oscar by the Academy, who went for Tom Hanks in Philadelphia. Oh dear) is astonishing, conjuring up the fullest portrayal of an extraordinary man that is possible. We will probably never know just what drove Schindler, but we can hope that it's the simplest thing of all. Humanity.
And Neeson is riveting in this role, a commanding presence who dominates every scene, and manages to combine both a slow-burning intensity as a man who was being eaten away by his conscience and the horrors around him, and a light touch as someone who had to laugh and joke along with the very people responsible for exterminating all those who he wants to save. It's a tremendous performance, that keeps Schindler full of shades and contrasts instead of obvious and patronising. The drama is nearly as much about can Schindler save his own soul in the hell he lives in, than it is about the lives he can save. The drama is rich and powerful here, as the technicalities are astonishing and peerless.
Kingsley would seem to have the thankless task of having the least interesting part as the accountant that is invaluable to Schindler. But he acts as Schindler's conscience, slowly chipping away at him and his blind refusal to acknowledge what's going on around him, simply by virtue of being there and Kingsley expertly conveys the anguish of the man who is a knotted ball of anxiety inside. Anxious that if he say too much or the wrong thing to Schindler, that he will disappear to Auschwitz in a moment, and anxious that he's living in a world where life and death for his race are as arbitrary as the changing of the weather.
And then there's Fiennes. If this isn't one of the most disturbed, terrifying, pitiable individuals to ever be represented on screen, then someone will have to show me, because Goeth is the most horrific monster to appear in a film, possibly ever. And I will use that word monster. What other word could describe a man who casually extinguishes human lives like he would snuff out a match? A man who considers that true power is having the power to kill, but doesn't, but goes ahead and slaughters children anyway. Why? Because he can. Some people criticise 'Schindler's List' because Goeth is 'too inhuman'. Well you know what? Some Nazis were absolutely inhuman, and Finnes is simply jaw-dropping as a monster who can look at himself in a mirror, still see the traces of humanity that linger there, but still go and take casual shots at passing Jewish workers. And why does he does this? Because he can pardon himself. It's a terrifying portrait of a man given all the power in the world, and who is on an endless path to insanity because he's looked into the abyss so much that it's looking straight back at him.
There are other criticisms too, some valid. The little red girl in a red dress is an effective touch, but when the film is so effective anyway, it comes across as slightly jarring. And for all the tightly reigned in emotions, Neeson's final breakdown into tears isn't really needed. We know what Schindler is feeling, we don't need to be told here. It will probably make you cry too, but it's the only time you get the faint impression of Spielberg pulling the strings.
But the criticism that Spielberg ignores the characters of the Jews to focus on the characters of the Nazis instead? Incredible. Spielberg gives us a peek of just how utterly cruel the regime that created this nightmare had to be and he's derided for it? How can we fully understand the horror of the Holocaust until we understand who caused it? And I for one can certainly remember the characters of Helen Hirsch (Embeth Davidz) or Mark Ivanir as Marcel Goldberg. He doesn't focus on the Jews? Did these people actually watch the film or just concentrate on deciding on what they could knock Spielberg for instead?And lastly, there's always the "we never understand why he saved them all" criticism. We are witnesses to a scene where Schindler stands atop a hill and watches in horror as the Nazis clean out the ghetto to take the Jews to the concentration camps. He watches women and children being slaughtered in the street. To those critics I say, isn't that the reason? That he could no longer just stand by and nothing? Perhaps the question we should be asking is why did no-one else do anything. Why did Oskar Schindler "save all those Jews"? For the very same reason that we should never stand by and let the same thing happen again. Because he was human.
link directly to this review at https://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=286&reviewer=293
originally posted: 02/24/05 04:58:37
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USA
23-Feb-1997 (R)
DVD: 09-Mar-2004
UK
N/A
Australia
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