Review: Schindler's List

Schindler's List

Oskar Schindler ........ Liam Neeson

Itzhak Stern ........... Ben Kingsley

Amon Goeth ............. Ralph Fiennes

Emilie Schindler ....... Caroline Goodall

Poldek Pfefferberg ..... Jonathan Sagalle

Helen Hirsch ........... Embeth Davidtz

Universal presents a film directed by Steven Spielberg. Produced by Spielberg, Gerald R. Molen and Branko Lustig. Written by Steven Zaillian. Based on the novel by Thomas Keneally. Photographed by Janusz Kaminski. Edited by Michael Kahn. Music by John Williams. Running time: 184 minutes. Classified: R (for language, some sexuality and actuality violence).

Stephen Spielberg has directed three or four of the ten top grossing pictures of all time, including "E. T.," "Jurassic Park," and "Jaws." But "Schindler's List" is unquestionably his masterpiece, and a very different film from the others. Typically we associate Spielberg with fairly light-hearted stuff, however skillfully directed. In a typical Spielberg movie, there are all sorts of tour-de-force scenes, scenes that seem designed primarily to show what wonderful things a director can do if he has a big enough budget at his disposal. The present film, though an even greater directorial challenge than the others, with huge sets and a "cast of thousands," as they used to say, contains no "gee whiz" scenes. The direction is quite subordinate to the story, the power of which is enormous.

That is not to say that there aren't some directorial tricks; but these are subordinate to the theme. For example, the film is mostly in black and white film, the medium in which most of our communal memories of the 1940s are stored. This is not at all distracting; it seems the most natural way possible to add realism to the drama. But there are daubs of color here and there, for reasons important to the film's purpose. For example, in all the grayness and the Warsaw ghetto massacre, there is a little red on a young girl's coat. She is running away from the German murderers. We see that coat and remember it when we later see the dead body of the girl being hauled away with a load of other Jewish corpses.

Oskar Schindler is a German businessman who discovers early in World War II that if one can (1) make something useful to the war effort (2) hire Jewish workers who can be had for slave wages (3) attract investment from Jewish businessmen who legally cannot own property and thus must do all their bargaining informally, he can make a great deal of money. He is played by Liam Neeson, somewhat against his usual type-casting. Neeson often plays vulnerable, super-sensitive men; here, his inner life is quite closed to us. On the outside, he is oblivious to the suffering around him, interested only in business, money, and good times. He is a member of the Nazi party and cultivates friendships among the S. S.

At some point, however, his fundamental motivation does change. Perhaps that point is the Nazis' destruction of the Warsaw ghetto, which he watches from a hill, where he and a woman friend (one of many) have come on a horseback ride. The film does not tell us when he is changing and why. Naturally; for to talk about such things in that context might have meant death. And in any case, to leave that question open is certainly better drama. Schindler displays his changed convictions in his acts, not speeches, soliloquies, or emotional outbursts. However this change took place, the second half of the film shows Schindler using all his powers conning Nazis, paying them off (losing all his money in the process), rescuing Jews, and undermining the German war effort. He and Itzhak Stern, his Jewish bookkeeper, compile a list of Jews who would otherwise almost certainly be considered "expendable" and Schindler demands that the Jews on that list be freed to work in Schindler's factory. When the Jews are routed to Auschwitz by mistake, Schindler even marches into the death camp to take them back. These are "his people;" the film presents this rescue as a Moses/Pharoah confrontation.

To the Nazis, his motivation is still business. One slight dramatic weakness in the film is the stupidity of the Nazis and officers-- reminiscent almost of Colonel Klink in the old TV comedy, "Hogan's Heroes." Were they really so gullible as to fall for Schindler's really rather transparent scams? Perhaps Spielberg would like to believe they were, but I have my doubts.

Parallels between Schinldler and Moses abound in the film, whether by Spielberg's intention or by divine providence in the real history. As Moses was trained in all the wisdom of the Egyptians, so Schindler was part of the oppressive establishment. As Moses was moved by a close-up view of oppression, so was Schindler. As Moses led the people through the wilderness, so Schindler takes his enormous workforce on an improbable journey from Poland to Czechoslovakia. As God led the people under Moses, so it seems that an invisible hand is pushing obstacles from Schindler's path. Of course, Moses was Jewish; Schindler was not, though Moses was criticized for having married a foreign wife, and he may have been under suspicion for his ties to Pharaoh's daughter.

Unlike Moses, however, Schindler was essentially a showman. Early on, he tells Stern that he (Schindler) knows little about running factories and recruiting workers; that is Stern's job. Schindler's job is to keep up appearances. He wines and dines the Nazis and military officers. He sends them big baskets of black-market delicacies, keeps everybody happy with bribes. He tells all sorts of plausible lies about how this or that worker is enormously skilled or how this other man is absolutely essential for the war effort. Meanwhile he does his best to see to it that his munitions factory does not produce a single usable shell. Schindler's story must have appealed to Spielberg in part because it is a story of salvation-through-theater. This idea has been tried before, for example, in the TV series, "Mission Impossible." There, super-professional thespians saved the world each week through disguises, performances, elaborate sets and deceptions. In MI, it was just good fun. But in this movie, it almost seems like it could have happened. Maybe it did.

Schindler's Jews survive. There are now 6000 of their descendants. By way of contrast, at the end of the war, only 4000 Jews remained alive in Poland. Many of the rescued Jews and their families appear at the end of the film, putting memorial stones on Schindler's grave. It is a fitting and moving conclusion.

The Holocaust, more than the biblical Exodus, is the great historical event which dominates the memory of the Jewish community today and unites that community-- both the theists and the atheists among them. The horrors of that time have caused some Jews to renounce God, others to think of him in a different way.

This film presents a savior from the atrocities, a savior of a few thousand among the six million destroyed. (The real Moses, I note, saved quite a few more; but not as many as Jesus.) The savior in this film is a secularist who is scarcely aware of his own motives and who has no master plan, but improvises his way from one difficulty to the next. The churches in the film are used only for clandestine meetings of Jews and, at one point, as a setting for Schindler's marriage proposal. Christians must ask the serious question, where was the body of Christ? Of course, there were heroic Christians too during the war. But why did so many professing Christians do nothing, or even support the evil Nazi regime?

And, of course, there is the larger question, where was God? I will not trivialize these terrible events by promulgating some theory of why God let them happen, though I have faith that He had purposes even in this history which were wonderfully wise. But there is a problem here for unbelief as well. Certainly the situation destroys both ethical relativism and humanist sentimentality. After seeing this movie, few will be able to deny that there is real evil, and it clearly infected not only Hitler and his henchmen, but vast numbers of collaborators and passive observers, not excluding Schindler himself, the self-described war profiteer. Would any of us have done any better?

Simply by telling the historical truth, the film shows mankind's desperate need for divine forgiveness in Christ. And it shows that even the efforts of a great man can only save a few, for a few years more of physical life. If there is justice at all, there must be an eternal life, and the savior must be God himself. The Biblical story is not salvation-through-theater; it is, in execution and result, the sheerest reality. This story raises some questions that are difficult for Christians (or anyone else) to answer. But it also raises some that only Christianity can resolve.