Lest we forget...

Rating: 9/10 (19 April 2000)

Steven Spielberg on the holocaust. Naturally the kids are cute even as they are diving into the excrement-filled waters of the latrine to hide from the Nazis... Schindler, played believably by big, handsome Liam Neeson (he was the guy Whoopi Goldberg was panting over at the Oscars last month) is a sweet womanizer who exploits Jewish labor in his factories and then feels guilty about it and ends up saving the lives of eleven hundred. Ben Kingsley plays his accountant with precision and his usual subdued intensity. We have again all the Nazi horror, in some ways worst than ever, and rightly so. Here we see a lot of the random shooting of people. The Nazis just use them for target practice or blow their brains out just to be doing something. The cattle cars are there and the gas ovens and the Nazi psychopaths and all the rest of it, although Spielberg adds some touches like Ralph Fiennes as the Nazi who kept a Jewish woman he was interested in but couldn't love or even rape, but could only beat. And among the guards who are herding the Jews along are a couple who smile at the kids, as though Spielberg is saying, 'here is this juxtaposition: the horror of the most degraded and inhuman acts known to humankind, but look even the monsters think the kids are cute.'
We humans ought to have our face rubbed in this at least once a decade. Still I think the concentration camp bits from Sophie's Choice (1982), to which Spielberg owes something, were better. But maybe that's faulty memory. And filming the whole thing in black and white and then turning it all to color with the shot of the actual Jews (now middle-aged) that Schindler saved from the Nazis was a bit stagy, although I have to say showing that one little Jewish girl's red dress (the only bit of color in the movie until the end) was a striking touch: we see her in the red dress when she hides and then when they dig up the bodies we see it again.
(Note: Over 500 of my movie reviews are now available in my book "Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!" Get it at Amazon!)