A moving story.

Rating: 8/10 (23 October 2007)

Steven Spielberg, until the appearance of this film, was rightly noted mainly for his child's view of movies, fast action, easy sentiment, and a generally accurate sense of appeal to fantasy and wish fulfillment. He pretty much discarded that sort of innocence here, without leaving behind his appreciation of the commercial value of a story.
It's impossible not to be deeply moved. The extermination program of the Nazis was the most horrific offense to human morality of the 20th century, and one of the worst in history. It wasn't the worst of the slaughters. The two world wars qualified for those honors. It wasn't even the worst example of ethnic cleansing, as it's come to be called. But more than six million Jews and more than seven million other undesirables -- homosexuals, the mentally ill, gypsies, political dissidents -- perished in the camps and not a single Jewish family in Europe went untouched. And it wasn't a war in which the victims were fighting back. It was a deliberate and very thorough act of genocide on the part of a people that Madame de Stael once described as "a nation of poets and dreamers."
It's a kind of "cross-over" movie in which the protagonist is not Jewish but rather a Christian who comes to their rescue. A basically decent man comes to his senses. This is the formula, whether the despised and abused minority are Jews or African-Americans. If it were otherwise, there would be a danger of this being seen somehow as a "Jewish" movie by the unenlightened masses and, as a consequence, might suffer at the box office. Better "In the Heat of the Night" than "Superfly."
But Spielberg has avoided most of the clichÃ©s associated with films of the final solution. No voice overs telling us of the suffering. No stock footage of bull dozers plowing corpses into mass graves. For the most part, the story stays at the personal level. (We hear hardly anything of the progress of the war.) And it's at this level that the film excels, due to the mature script and the performances of Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley and Ralph Feinnes. There are many other characters, including Embeth Davidtz.
The film is good because Neason's character begins not as a racist or a humanitarian but as a moral nihilist. He cares about nothing but money and the sensory pleasures it affords. He couldn't care less about the Jews, or about the Nazis either for that matter. The war to him is just a way of making a profit using cheap labor. And the script rises above the formulaic in not giving him a moment of epiphany. At no point does his brow furrow, his eyes light up, and he thinks to himself, "My God, what am I doing?" Nope. Instead, his development is informed by minor but important insights distributed here and there. After the surrender, he leaves the camp as a fugitive, dressed in prison clothes, mourning his carelessness in not saving more lives.
Spielberg tells the story in a straightforward way but of course some incidents and dialog from events of fifty years ago must be fabricated. And the fabrications are well done. Especially enjoyable is the touchy, sometimes abrasive, and often humorous relationship between Neason, the salesman and con man who simply has no head for business, and Ben Kingsley as the matter-of-fact accountant who does. I'd give examples of some exchanges but there isn't space.
Spielberg hasn't quite gotten over his taste for easy sentimentality. There are only two touches of color in this black-and-white movie. A little girl in a rose-colored coat appears two or three times, so that we can know who it is when her body is wheeled past in a barrow, just another victim. And when the workers hold a ceremony on Shabat, the candle flames are touched with a warm orange that signifies life. Effective, yes, but unnecessary in an adult film like this. Most people watching the film may be trusted to know what's going on without being nudged. But that's small stuff. Somewhat more embarrassing is a scene in which a German officer screams like a maniac and makes gargoyle faces at the camera after emptying his pistol into a mountain of burning bodies. Are we supposed to learn from this that the people running the camps were evil?
The Nazi's extermination program prompted many studies in social science, none of which has contributed much to our understanding of why this, and similar programs, seem to be so common around the world. It's easy enough to blame Germany and the SS, but what happened in Kosovo, Maylasia, Cambodia, and Rwanda? Perhaps one of the reasons we've never really understood it is that we don't want to. Perhaps the answer lies not in "F" (for "facism") scales or ideographic studies of power but in the darkest aspects of human nature itself. Is there a group of people who have nothing in common but their ethnic identity that we ourselves would enjoy seeing wiped off the map? We all have massive cerebral cortices, much of the functions of which seem devoted to damping down impulses from structures lower down on the brain that generate desires to mate, to flee from danger, and to kill things and people that get in our way.
Some day science might give us an answer but until then we have to rely on poets like Robert Burns.
'Many and sharp the num'rous ills Inwoven with our frame! More pointed still we make ourselves Regret, remorse, and shame! And Man, whose heav'n-erected face The smiles of love adorn, - Man's inhumanity to man Makes countless thousands mourn!