Thoughts on Schindler's List

Rating: 7/10 (3 August 2017)

This movie is visually stunning. Just the sheer mass of extras, set design, costumes, cinematography, and everything else that went into this movie is breathtaking. Through all this, the movie definitely pulls off a war-time atmosphere, the black & white photography only adds another element to this. The acting is (mostly) great. And the story is a good one and an important one. What Schindler did deserves our recognition, respect, and reverence. I'm glad Spielberg was able to bring it to our attention.
Now for the problems with this movie. First off, the length: I think this movie's 3 hour 15 minute runtime just snuck by Gandhi as the longest theatrically released movie in my viewing history. I try not to make a fuss over the length of a movie; however long the director requires to get their story across to the audience is up to them. What I do take issue with is a movie that has a 3+ hour long runtime that is completely unnecessary such as this one. This movie contains a story that doesn't need its allotted time. I think a 200 minute cut of this movie would really improve it, maybe even a straight 2 hours if you're pushing it. Too much time is taken replaying the horrors of Nazi-occupied Germany seemingly over and over again. I just want to be clear that I am not trying to diminish what happened or the emotional impact these scenes have, however when we as an audience are bombarded with scene after scene of tyrannical cruelty via the hands of the Germans, the emotional effectiveness of said scenes starts to fall under the law of diminishing returns. At a certain point, I as an audience member have no emotional energy left to invest and the effort Spielberg's putting into causing a mournful tone just becomes fruitless. With most things in life, overexposure will lead to dulling of the senses and emotional desensitization. I am aware that what is occurring on- screen is horrendous but my mind can no longer keep up with what is being presented. Sometimes less is more.
My next issue relates to the treatment of the protagonists and antagonists of this movie. No, there is no excuse for what the Nazis did and defending this party or their belief system is contemptible and disturbing. But as a director making an Oscar-winning Best Picture, please do not make your characters these black and white symbols of good and evil. Not every person in the Nazi regime was 100% certifiably evil; not every person representing the good guys was a sinless angel. It is up to you as a director to show us these characters, their nuances, their grey areas, and their stories as a whole. It is up to us as an audience to take in all of this and make decisions about these stories and their characters. But when a director paints all these characters in broad strokes, labeling everyone as either entirely pure or entirely evil, he or she has taken the decision out of our hands and we as an audience are forced to consume the subject matter from the pre-destined moralistic vantage point that the director has prepared for us. That is exactly what has happened here. Spielberg hold our hand through the entirety of this movie, not leaving anything up to the audience's interpretation or judgment. In Roman Polanski's "The Pianist", we get to see the multiple dimensions to characters from this conflict. Polanski focuses more on the character development of the Nazis and Jews and less on the abhorrent crimes that were occurring. So, when we do see some kind of appalling act taking place on the screen, it is considerably more effect and haunting. But the point is that Polanski treats all characters, whether bad or good, like human beings. And, to me at least, it is much more frightening to see people with humanlike qualities behind these egregious acts of genocide. (See "Downfall" for another great example.) Spielberg's Nazis act more like monsters from some other dimension, far less unsettling.
Another issue I see with this movie is the character arc of our main focus, Oskar Schindler himself. At the beginning of this movie, we see a man who can be labeled as a womanizer, a drunkard, an opportunist, and someone who is self-centered and focused on personal wealth attainment. By the end of the movie we see a family man melodramatically balling his eyes out because he didn't give away enough of his wealth to save more Jews. (Did we really need that scene?) In theory this is a nice beginning and end point, however during the movie itself, we do not see exactly how this man went from being an egoist to a full-fledged humanitarian. Sure, the scenes involving the young girl with the red coat is supposed to represent a pair of epiphanies that Schindler has that alters his mindset similar to a Dickensian Scrooge. However, to me at least, these two scene do not do enough to cause me to buy this change. This movie is 3 hours and 15 minutes. We could spend a little of that time seeing Schindler's subtle changes over the course of the war. Instead we have this dramatic shift seemingly overnight that is difficult to swallow for me as an audience member. The character development just comes across as half-baked.
Despite all the gripes I have with this film, I still think Spielberg made a fine movie here. He told a beautiful story competently and with a few scenes that left me awe-struck. While the length of this film is a bit overwhelming, it is still something that I think everyone should see at least once, a very important piece of film history.