Mediocre and overrated

Rating: 4/10 (11 May 2012)

The story is about the efforts that Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson), a World War II profiteer, put out in order to save the Jews from Plaszow concentration camp. Let us make it very clear: from the starting point, Schindler has no interest in saving the Jews. His sole interest, at first, was to make money. How was this man converted from being an opportunistic businessman into a courageous human soul who was willing to save thousands of lives? He even appeared initially unaffected when SS-Lieutenant Amon Goth (Ralph Fiennce) blissfully murdered innocent Jews. How, then, could this man break down at the end of the film because he could not save just one more life is baffling. Agreed that he was surrounded by good Jews, but the probable reason for his transition (encountering a dead Jews who thanked him) was utterly self-congratulatory. Was he even terrified by the murders that were going on (if he was, he never showed it on screen any way)? Perhaps, only the extraordinary Schindler himself could help Spielberg realize it. Or did Spielberg care about strong characterizations, at all? There was no complexity here.
However, Liam Neeson's Schindler was given pretty decent treatment when you consider the other elements in Schindler's List. Particularly was, the vicious monster of the story, Lieutenant Amon Goth. Was he the only one who killed (or loved killing) Jews throughout this whole affair? I had this question on my mind when the film exclusively focused on him insanely shooting random Jews from his bedroom. Giving a mad figure the special treatment of being the leading culprit of this mass murder is a laughably simplistic way to make sense of the Holocaust. And it fits into the general audience's banal understanding of the event. The key to Holocaust is the diffusion of responsibility among the persecutors and the lack of moral convictions on the very part of the human race. Those complex concepts were given no treatment in Schindler's List. Instead, everything is reduced to insanity. The very possibility of the Holocaust, therefore, remains alien to a whole audience, who, perhaps, come to see the film just to feel a sense of grandness and liberal guilt. Raplh Fience was terrific in his performance. However, his role, sadly, served as a springboard for the audience to blindly put their blame on. How revealing!
In short, the treatment of both Schindler and Goth shed no light on the ambiguity of human nature. Schindler suddenly became "good" while Goth was inherently "bad" (This only makes the visual comparisons between the two men all the more exploitative). Everything seems pretty common sense, and obviously very digestible. However, if there is a most deplorable injustice being done here, it was the presentation of the Jewish community. Perhaps, everyone who has watched this film can recall the scene of a little girl splashed in red that Schindler spotted during the liquidation of the concentration camp. Anyone could have been fooled by this imagery, whether a film amateur or a veteran film fan. However, if you sit back to think about it, the image is pretty fortuitous. What does this present exactly? Hope? Love? Future? Or even blood? This middle-browned attempt to convey some visual meanings does not succeed in any meaningful way. Worse still, it is an exploitation of the bathos of childhood innocence, which does not make sense in this circumstance. We are dealing with the Jewish community as a whole, not some selective individuals that were singled out from this whole in order for us to dwell on 'sophisticated' feelings of loss and hope. If there is a lesson that is unforgettable about the Holocaust, it is the unjustified prejudice and hatred inflicted upon the Jewish community as a race, not just the brutality and violence that any particular Jew experienced (if you want to know about brutality and trauma, you can ask the 20 million Russians who were dead also). Why not color every Jew red then? Any selective visual presentation in this case is misguiding; and manipulative. Even the sequence that precedes it, a moral struggle between mother, daughter and childhood friend during evacuation does not feel like a climax. It is so trite, so predictable that one might just allow himself to rumble with all the emotions that Spielberg has designed for him. It feels as if, the audience is told what they already know, and all they need to do is sit there, ruminating like an act.
The saddest thing is that at the end, when the credit rolls "In memory of the 6 million Jews who died during the Holocaust", I wonder what the whole film has to do with those 6 million deaths. If you are inattentive and easy-going, you would freely accept it as an earnest tribute to them. But really? Telling the clichÃ© story of a thousand who were alive is the tribute to the 6 million who were dead? What does this film have to do with the dead anyway? The desperation, the horror, the pain, the shame and the doubt of those who went dead were not adequately conveyed. Oh, just tell the marvelous story of saving lives to make the audience open their mouths and wonder. And we can forget about those who were dead. What a lovely tribute that Spielberg made!
The real story is extraordinary. But there must be a way of telling it without this pretentious sense of self-importance that makes it so easily consumed by an uninformed audience. At no point in this film, do I feel a sense of desperation, that sense of "needing to get out of this horrible nightmare". It was just like watching a prodigious show that make you feel "wowed" (and admire, and cry?). But remember that grandness cannot replace substance. Indeed, Holocaust is a very difficult subject matter. It needs to be approached first with intelligence. But Spielberg evidently failed to do so.