Focused on the wrong things

Rating: 6/10 (5 February 2019)

This is a film that is made by a filmmaker at the height of his powers. The dramatization of the Holocaust is some of the most intense footage ever made. In so far as the end goal was to get the viewer to experience even a small part of horrors European Jews experienced the film succeeds wonderfully.
But the film's focus is critically off in two ways. Schindler's story of moving from an amoral capitalist to a humanitarian saver is compelling but it is not what the Holocaust was. It was genocide, murder and pointless brutality. There's no good reason to tell Schindler's story as the central point. It was and is an anomaly. This problem is really brought home with the fake out sequence in the Auschwitz showers/gas chamber. Most people who entered that space were murdered. It is almost as if Spielberg cannot bring himself to display the actual horrors of genocide directly. To tell only the story of Schindler's List is fundamentally misleading.
Second, I don't understand why Stern isn't the protagonist or why Schindler is. To frame the Holocaust through the eyes of a German gentile is gross. Schindler, for all his goodness, was not the target of the genocide. Moreover, certain beats in Schindler's story trivialize the Holocaust if treated as the focal point. The famous sequence of the young girl in the red coat is the moment Schindler changes. It is when he first sees the humanity of Jewish people. But that isn't what matters. What matters is the mass murder that is occurring. If the film made Stern the protagonist this problem would be greatly lessened.
This is a film with messed up priorities.