Studying him, we realize that Nazism depended on people able to think like Jeffrey Dahmer. He bribes, he wheedles, he bluffs, he escapes discovery by the skin of his teeth. In the movie's most audacious sequence, when a trainload of his employees is mistakenly routed to Auschwitz, he walks into the death camp himself and brazenly talks the authorities out of their victims, snatching them from death and putting them back on the train to his factory. What is most amazing about this film is how completely Spielberg serves his story. The movie is brilliantly acted, written, directed and seen.
Individual scenes are masterpieces of art direction, cinematography, special effects, crowd control.
Yet Spielberg, the stylist whose films often have gloried in shots we are intended to notice and remember, disappears into his work. Neeson, Kingsley and the other actors are devoid of acting flourishes. There is a single-mindedness to the enterprise that is awesome. At the end of the film, there is a sequence of overwhelming emotional impact, involving the actual people who were saved by Schindler. The obvious lesson would seem to be that Schindler did more than a whole nation to spare its Jews.