Profound meditation on good and evil

Rating: 10/10 (4 March 1999)

Steven Spielberg showed he could make grown-up movies with this powerful drama about the Holocaust and about one of the handful of people who tried to save Jews rather than kill them or allow them to be killed during this time. It's unflinching in looking at the nature of good and the nature of evil. The good is represented, at its most unlikely, in the form of Oskar Schindler, a womanizer, boozer, charmer, and money-grubber who nonetheless manages to do one good thing and save over a thousand lives. Contrary to what some people have commented, he is not presented as a saint, but as a complex, enigmatic human being, and Liam Neeson plays him that way splendidly. I do agree the scene where Schindler wishes he could have saved more feels misguided, but that's my only complaint about the film.
On the other side of the coin is Ralph Fiennes, in an absolute chilling portrayal, as Amon Goeth, who represents evil here. Yet like Schindler, his is not a simplistic portrayal, but is someone who doesn't feel anything, except contempt and maybe a little greed. He kills not out of pathology but rather out of boredom. The only time we see any feelings come over him is when he decides, as an experiment, to spare people who do wrong, rather than kill them, and it shakes him, so he goes back to killing. Also he's undone by Helen Hirsch, his maid, so he lashes out at her even more than if it was just some servant. The genius of the movie is to see him and Schindler as closer than we would like to think. Also, Ben Kingsley is very good.
Spielberg was trying to bring the reality of the Holocaust to people who didn't know about it, and maybe were being bombarded by all the hate groups who are spreading a disinformation campaign by saying it never happened. And I think he suceeded brilliantly.