Schindler’s List
Schindler’s List
The Holocaust is a subject that may never have a defining film. To encapsulate all of the stories and atrocities, to capture the mood and dissect the minds of those involved on both sides is too vast an undertaking to be pulled off successfully. Many argue that Claude Lanzmann’s nine hour documentary Shoah is such a film, but even the most ardent of scholars and film fans find it difficult to take in. Year after year we are treated to a new vision into its horrifying mysteries in movies intent on capturing Oscar gold, sometimes feeling like a shameless grab for easy sympathy and critical forgiveness hiding behind an obligatory guilt trip. Though it definitely has its detractors, Schindler’s List stands apart as not your average Holocaust film that mixes genuine horror, stark reality, and gripping entertainment all into one profound masterpiece.
The film boasts a stellar performance from Liam Neeson as Oskar Schindler, an ambitious industrialist who moves to Poland in hopes of buying a repossessed Jewish factory cheap and employing Jewish workers for starvation wages to get rich quick. Charming all of the top Nazi brass in town, Oskar gains a fortune profiting off of the war while his clever accountant Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley) uses the factory as a safe haven where workers can find shelter from the callous disregard for life outside of its walls.
Where the film begins to differ from the standard WWII movie is its ambiguity towards its hero. Schindler comes to Poland greedy and hollow, disloyal to his wife and only happy when he’s tricking the Nazis and his “investors” into making him rich. Nobody seems to mind, since he lines the Nazis pockets with small fortunes of their own and saves entire families from the firing squad. But he has no moral stand on Hitler’s policies, and becomes enraged over the murders of his workers not because he values human life, but because it slows down production. Schindler will spend a surprising chunk of the film in this mindset, witnessing murders, liquidation, and debauchery without much protest. Eventually he will crack and order Stern to compose the titular list which ensures safety for 1,100 Jewish workers who would otherwise be shipped off to death camps. But his breaking point is never clear, there is no ah-ha moment when he realizes the folly of his ways and begins to work good in the world. The film’s three hour runtime accentuates the painstaking amount of time it took for the world to come around and lend a helping hand to millions of suffering innocents, and Oskar becomes a microcosm for humanity at large.
He is doubled by Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes), the psychopathic commandant of a forced labor camp who is wrestling with his humanity on one hand, and power over life and death on the other. His involvement with the Nazis enables his obsession with the latter to reach catastrophic lows, to the point that he snipes off Jewish workers from his balcony before he even takes his morning leak. In Schindler he sees both a colleague and an idol, a man who seizes power through mercy and trickery. He is in love with his housemaid Helen (Embeth Davidtz) but cannot consolidate his affection with the fact that she is Jewish and thus inferior in his mind. His conflict is shielded from much scrutiny by the fact that he is clearly insane, a natural serial killer who got lucky and joined up with the Third Reich just when his hobby came into fashion. He is played by Fiennes with exuberant gusto, but at the end of the day he’s still a definitive villain whose intricacies are masked by an alarming absence of logic and compassion.
These two performances solidify a much more complicated and dissectible story that is content to say more than just that the Holocaust was bad whilst never softening the blow of its atrocities. Schindler’s List isn’t just a blanket statement sort of movie, it’s much more focused and restrained than it is given credit for. We are treated to a very small story set within an immense catastrophe that dares to involve us in the lives of the nameless. To us, they aren’t just a mob of innocents forced to march to their doom. They are the Pfferberg’s, Helen Hirsch, Rabbi Menasha, Lowenstein the one-armed machinist, Chaim Nowak the history teacher turned metal polisher, and young Danka Dresner and Olek Rosner These are the faces of the victims, and we get to know them beyond their titles and physical stature. Not only are we subjected to an environment where their lives can be taken literally at any moment, but we follow them as they are slowly robbed of everything they have in the world. The film opens with them registering for work cards; by the end they will have been forced out of their homes and into the Ghetto, violently forced out of the Ghetto and into work camps, stuffed into overcrowded trains and shipped off to death camps, and finally freed only to wander an Earth where many of their loved ones have been murdered and most of Europe still vehemently despises them. Their optimism and tenacity for survival fill in the great tragedy of a strong people who were bullied and beaten almost to the point of extinction, but who pulled through and, almost unbelievably, found ways to stay grateful for what this life had offered them.
Many accuse Schindler’s List of continuing to purport Steven Spielberg’s unique brand of sentimentality and optimism, two things they feel have no place in the telling of the Holocaust. Are they not two things that such a subject so desperately needs? The film offers so much for both optimists and cynics to unpack. It champions one man’s crusade to make a difference and save a proportionally small number of lives, but also condemns him for the time it took and his initial motivations. This is what makes Schindler such a dynamic figure. He’s a bad man who did a great thing and turned good along the way. Meanwhile, the movie is unflinching in its depiction of the violence and humiliation the Jews were subjected to. Children are shot in the streets, thousands of bodies are immolated, but a stand out chilling moment focuses on a young girl vigorously screeching “goodbye Jews!” at the columns of refugees on their way into the ghetto. To say that Schindler’s List glosses over society’s great failure in the service of a feel good rescue mission/heist movie seems to betray an incredibly detached insight to its message.
Schindler’s List would probably rank near the top of the all-time most depressing movies list, but Spielberg displays his unparalleled skill by making it endlessly watchable, possibly even entertaining. The opening hour balances an ominous sense of dread with some well-placed laughs that poke fun at Schindler’s womanizing and discreet charm. It’s always fun to witness the differing ways in which some movies stick it to the Nazis, and where Indiana Jones throws them under a truck and literally melts their faces off, Schindler employs diplomacy and deceit. It is always engaging to watch him confidently stroll into the office of an SS official and make vague threats that endanger the soldier’s career. The Nazis think they have Schindler pegged as a playboy and war profiteer, but he’s always one step ahead of them, masquerading a con to rob them of their bloodlust with fancy champagne and fine cheeses in gift baskets. Neeson practically bleeds charisma in his standoffs with the SS, and our possible contempt for his lifestyle is quickly abated when we realize that he’s playing them all like suckers.
None stand blameless by the end of Schindler’s List, which crescendos with one of cinema’s most heartbreaking scenes wherein Schindler looks around at “his” 1,100 Jews and cries out “I could have got more out!” But it’s not just a guilt trip that defies criticism, it’s an admonition to all of us to stand as a witness and to never allow this sort of thing to happen again. Unfortunately, it still does, and most of us feel helpless in the mix. What can one person do? Spielberg has shown us that a broke man with ambition was converted and saved the lives of 1,100 human beings, whose descendants in 1993 numbered over 6,000 — two-thousand more than the Jewish population in Poland at the time. The value of a life is sacred, and whether or not the film is about the salvation of the 1,100 or just Schindler himself is a topic for another time. The task was impossible, and Schindler lost his entire fortune sheltering his workers. He failed in multiple businesses after the war, but died a very rich man. To decry such a notion as “Capra-corn” misses the powerful statement made during the film’s closing scene when the descendants of the Schindler Jews come to pay their respects at his grave. The value of a single human life is sacred, and Schindler’s List proudly joins It’s a Wonderful Life as one of the definitive works of art on the subject. It is overwhelming to think of the countless generations erased from history by warmongers and racists, yet we are reminded watching this film that the great mass of individuals are easily lost like bodies in a pile or names on a list. Their injustice is not lost on us, but Spielberg’s masterpiece enables us to not be overwhelmed by the masses and helps us to reach out to that one small child in a red coat.
