Schindler's List

Rating: Null/10 (12 November 2012)

Steven Spielberg's meticulous, passionate direction; John Williams' haunting, uplifting score, highlighted by violin solos by Itzhak Perlman; Janusz Kaminski's stunning black-and-white photography; Steven Zaillian's award-winning screenplay; and the acting brilliance of Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley, and Ralph Fiennes coalesce to render, ironically, one of the most beautiful films ever made, based on actual events that took place during one of the ugliest chapters in modern history. Neeson's screen presence as Oskar Schindler, the unlikely savior of hundreds of Polish Jews during the Holocaust, is commanding and magnetic. Kingsley's performance as Schindler's accountant and eventual friend is neurotic and tender. Fiennes plays Amon Goeth, a cold, sadistic Nazi officer, with startling range and subtlety. Williams' score and Spielberg's camera are characters in their own right, narrating and observing with unnerving honesty and pathos. From the perspective of the captive Jews and their plight, Schindler's List is frightening beyond imagination, thrilling, and unbearably sad. From Schindler's perspective, the initial prospect of profiting from a slave-wage workforce and an economic climate that only war could engender is opportunistically exciting. But when the plan changes from profit to protection, the excitement takes on a different form, as Schindler faces the danger of the Nazis discovering his altruistic motives at every turn. From the perspective of the Nazis, the unconstrained license to kill, at justifiably remorseless will, is liberating. Murder is easy, especially when the victims have been dehumanized in a much more savage way than any real wartime enemy. In one scene, a Nazi is firing rounds into a burning hill of murdered Jews, and he is screaming jubilantly and laughing. In another, Amon Goeth picks off random workers from his bird's eye "villa" as if he is shooting at clay pigeons. It's target practice; it's a free game, a joke. That feeling of irresponsible liberation is eventually supplanted by true liberation as the clandestinely moral acts of Oskar Schindler overtake the immorality of the Nazis and as Schindler assumes the weighty responsibility for more and more human lives. Schindler's List is not a movie about the Holocaust, any more than it is a movie about World War II. It is about a man—a magnanimous profiteer—living in a time and place of unspeakable acts. It's about a forbidden friendship that flourishes amidst the failure of humanity and the prevalence of hatred. And it's about the hope for—not the triumph of—Good over Evil.