"Not the work – the presentation"

Rating: 10/10 (1 January 2012)

One of the benefits of our modern day cinema (and by modern, I mean last forty-odd years) is that movies can be made with complete frankness. The more difficult segments of history can be recreated with some accuracy. Schindler's List deals with subject matter so sensitive, and tells one of the most important stories of the entire century, that the makers absolutely have to get it right, on every level. Thankfully, they did.
Screenwriter Steve Zaillian has taken on the difficult task of adapting a work of non-fiction. Much of the picture is simply a series of vignettes, most not strictly necessary to the plot, the sort of material that has been cut for reasons of space in a thousand lesser pictures. But they contribute to an overall tone – each has its own meaning, and to cut one would make for a poorer film. Although it of course follows real events as closely as possible, great care is taken with the rate at which we are exposed to the magnitude of horror. The first two deaths we see – the one-armed man and the civil engineer – are painfully shocking. But by the time we get to the ransacking of the ghetto we are desensitised to the killing, immersed in this world where the ending of life is a casual act. Lines of dialogue which at first seem trivial gain resonance later on. When meeting with the black marketers Schindler tells them "Nice things cost money". Eventually he will be buying human lives.
In evaluations of Schindler's List, so often the importance of the man who portrayed the title role is forgotten. Liam Neeson's performance perhaps doesn't stand out too much because it is very low-key, and the character is almost passive for all his significance. But this makes Neeson's work all the more impressive. He puts all of Schindler's emotion, all his thought, into this restrained façade. Schindler was a man who essentially spent the whole war keeping up a pretence, albeit for altruistic purposes, that he was a good party member and practical businessman, and Neeson handles this contradiction flawlessly. When he allows the floodgates to open in his final scene, the effect is devastating.
Steven Spielberg famously offered this project to a number of directors before deciding to take on the job himself. It could have been disastrous – his direction is appalling in The Color Purple, his first real drama – but in the intervening years he had improved considerably. For Schindler's List he takes an incredibly indirect approach, his camera often separated from the action or just focusing briefly on hands and objects, as if the material is somehow distant and difficult to fully engage with. Despite this distancing effect, Spielberg proves himself a master at picking out the important detail in each shot. To give one example, when we first see Ben Kingsley as Itzhak Stern, he is right at the back of a room with a dozen or so people in, but Spielberg has arranged everyone into diagonals so that our eyes are drawn straight to Kingsley. Spielberg's utter simplicity and lack of camera trickery are commendable. His careful pacing of scenes makes those all-important lines stand out, and emphasises the life in the people.
And this – the life – is essentially what Schindler's List is about. I didn't really intend to comment on the issues in the picture because I wanted to discuss it mainly as an example of perfection in filmmaking. But like any movie Schindler's List is not without its detractors, and sometimes people do miss the point. Spielberg has been accused of sugar-coating the holocaust, of taking this horrible event in history and making an uplifting story out of it. Of course, the Nazis did many more terrible things which the movie does not show, and it does end upon a note of hope. But the truth is, Schindler's List is not the story of the holocaust. It is the story of Oskar Schindler, a man who saved lives. The tragedies that occurred in Europe are the backdrop to this story, and the realities that Spielberg offers us a modest window onto are nonetheless graphic enough to give it meaning. This is not primarily a picture about the evil that went on, it is about the good that existed in spite of that evil. And if ever there was something worth making a motion picture about, it is this.