Since Oskar Schindler was the most magnificent con man who ever lived, a scam artist who bilked the Third Reich of the pleasure of torturing and killing more than eleven hundred human beings, it should not surprise us that he left a trap as his bequest to anyone trying to tell the story of his achievement. All honor then to director Steven Spielberg and scriptwriter Steven Zaillian (and, of course, Thomas Keneally, whose novel they adapted) for avoiding that trap, for succeeding in drawing from the contortions of Schindler's life and the horrors he surmounted, a movie that is always art, and sometimes great art.
What is the trap? Oskar Schindler was enormously attractive. He was attractive to men as a drinking buddy and raconteur, to women as a lover. Any storyteller worth his salt must reproduce that enveloping charm on the page or screen, or there simply is no story to tell, for charm (abetted by bribes) was Oskar's weapon of weapons. Charm made him a successful salesman for an electrical company in the economically depressed Central Europe of the late twenties; charm kept him out of the German army; charm gained him charge of the Cracow factory that made mess kits and field kitchenware and that earned Schindler a fortune. And Oskar's charm and money seduced Nazis into allowing him to siphon off the Jews of the neighboring workcamp of Plaszow into his factory. Forty-five workers at first, then two hundred and fifty, and finally, once Schindler had acquired a "subcamp" of his own, more than eleven hundred lives were held in the nicely manicured hands of this admirable fraud who kept them safe and never let even one slip through his fingers.
But Oskar's charm is the trap! It entrances us from beyond the grave. Not only Keneally (who has the excuse of being a novelist imagining his way under the skins of his characters) but any journalist, historian, or critic writing about this entrepreneur soon starts calling him Oskar. Indeed, one wants to have known him and to have witnessed him luxuriating in his success, gloating in the glory of his fancy cars and expensive clothes, holding his cigarette at that peculiarly Central European, forty-five-degree angle while scanning all the beautiful women in the dining room of some expensive restaurant. Suave Oskar, courteous Oskar, unfailingly adept Oskar is so much more gratifying to be with than...
Than the Jews he rescued. For prolonged, atrocious suffering does not render people pathetically attractive or lovable, though we may love and pity them anyway. Starvation and fear loosen bowels, create nasty smells, monotonous speech, lusterless eyes, ferret-like behavior. So, hide those Jews from us, Mr. Moviemaker, and spare our tender sensibilities. Well, don't conceal them entirely, for then we would have no one on hand for Oskar to rescue. Just keep them at a distance, in the background, in the shadows. Coax them into camera view when it is time for Our Hero to do his stuff, and then whisk them out of sight when they have served their purpose.
It's clear that Steven Spielberg was excited by Schindler's heroism for he cinematically glories in his protagonist's swash-buckling machinations. The scene in which the industrialist swoops down on a table of Nazis and their women and soon has them literally eating out of his hands is a triumph of leaping, synoptic editing: the rhythm emulates Oskar's dazzling bonhomie. But Spielberg has resisted making Schindler a star turn surrounded by supernumeraries. Instead, he has created a concerto. In any good concerto, the orchestra doesn't merely support the single instrument but creates the sonic world that gives the soloist a sonic destiny. In Schindler's List, the virtuosic con man finds his moral destiny and salvation in the world of suffering experienced by the Cracow prisoners. En masse, these victims become a character just as important as Schindler. This is their story as much as his. Spielberg and Zaillian and Keneally never let us forget that.
But nobody experiences suffering en masse but in his own body, in her own mind. Spielberg's camera isolates the face of an old man awaiting execution, the empty sleeve of a person whose armlessness cost him his life (one-armed people produce less slave labor), rivulets of blood in the corridor of a ghetto tenement, the upturned face of a child, up to his chest in the excrement of the jakes where he is hiding. Another director might have extracted a sentimental pornography out of all this woe, but in Spielberg's hands everything contributes to an overall feeling of monumental suffering.
Yet the avoidance of one trap leads perilously close to another. Against all this anguish, unflinchingly staged, must not Schindler's sleek, sexually busy existence seem an affront, no matter how great the man's heroism?
My answer is simple: no. This is a story not of unalleviated suffering but of succor and rescue. In any such story, the rescuer inevitably attracts the attention of the viewer precisely because he is in action, moving and transforming instead of awaiting and enduring.
Thoughtful people are coming out of this movie praising it but troubled by the question, "When did Schindler change? What was the motive for his self-sacrifice?" Which is perhaps just another way of asking the question, "How can this beefy sensualist be allowed as the hero of this movie if we can't clearly be shown the exact moment of conversion from sybarite to savior?"
Well, if you must have a turning point, there is the moment when Schindler sees from a hilltop the decimation of the Cracow ghetto and spots a little girl in a red coat. The moment is piercing because that red appears on the canvas of a black- and-white movie. (Horribly, that red will reappear later on a cart of corpses.) But that's only (only!) a moment of anguished realization on Oskar's part that he must act soon and radically. It's not really a turnaround of character, just an intensification of a concern he has already felt. So, again, where does Schindler's goodness come from?
We ask that question because we think we know what good- ness looks like. It looks like Gandhi, skinny in his loincloth, or Mother Teresa, unostentatious in her nun's habit. Goodness doesn't gourmandize or sleep with pretty Polish stenographers. Since Oskar Schindler never puts on a loincloth or goes on a fast or pays the least attention to his marital vows, how can we pinpoint his conversion? We can't. We can't because there is no fundamental conversion, only an ignition of a virtue that was waiting to be ig- nited. In truth, Schindler's goodness was aborning in the pleasure he took in food, in his several expensive cars, and, yes, in the beauty of the women he drafted into his personal seraglio. Godless, unstirred by and uncomfortable with ideas and ideals, unshakably a hustler to the very last day of his life, Schindler could imagine heaven only as a place here on earth, and he couldn't bear that anyone in his purview be forced to live in a hell on earth. The Final Solution affronted his pleasure-instinct. Oskar Schindler is the saint of sybarites.
He is played by Liam Neeson, all silk and steel. There is a line of Keneally's that Neeson must have contemplated during his preparation for this role: "Oskar murmured away in that peculiar rumble of his which could at the same time contain threat and bonhomie." Not only his voice but Neeson's entire char- acterization is that compound. In the sequences in which Schindler moves against his foes, Neeson propels his big frame forward like a tank and, in some shots, recalls the legendary hulks of German cinema's golden age, Emile Jannings or Werner Krauss. There are even times when he looks like Field Marshal Goering, a resemblance that carries its own mordant irony. But, courting women or Nazis, Neeson can be as debonair (and as much of a clothes horse) as Boyer or Redford. Up to now a specialist in attractive weaklings, Neeson allows no fissure to show in Schindler until his very last scene. But, when it comes, that breakdown is harrowing, a sudden fit of self-accusation in front of the people he has saved. In its mixture of self-revulsion and compassion, and in its over-the-top emotionality, the scene is Dostoevskian.
This movie is so good that it demands the ultimate judgment: Is it not only a movie of movies but among the best works of art in any medium?
I think the answer is no.
As long as Schindler's List is, it's not long enough. (It really could have been a TV miniseries.) Spielberg tries to pack in nearly all the complexities Keneally found and consequently often skims rather than delves. This skimming mars the most fascinating relationship in the film, Schindler' s friendship with Goeth, the commandant of the Plaszow prison camp (harrowingly played by Ralph Fiennes as a nihilistic baby). An entire movie could have been made about just these two men, and a full-scale contrast might have told us something startling about the human condition, for Goeth's evil is a materialism turned murderous as surely as Schindler's goodness is sensuality enacting itself as altruism. But Spielberg has dozens of other dramatic areas to cover and so he moves on, leaving us tantalized rather than enlightened. Also skimmed: the character of Schindler's wife who was as tough and enterprising as her husband and virtually ran the subcamp on the numerous occasions when her husband was being interrogated by the Gestapo.
One final thing must be said against this movie but it is no slur on Spielberg's individual artistry; it's rather a reservation about the capability of fiction in dealing with the Holocaust. The very greatest films on this subject– the twenty-minute Night and Fog of Alain Resnais or the seven-hour Shoah of Claude Lanzmann–are all documentary evocations of horror rather than reproductions. They vividly allude to the evils perpetrated and thereby spur us to imagine the horrors for ourselves. When Lanzmann's camera stares at the now empty trains that once transported Jews, or at the faces of survivors and wit- nesses, the spirit of evil seems to materialize before our eyes. In Schindler's List, we are always silently murmuring our astonishment at the filmic skill deployed on the recreation of horrors. But, in Shoah, skill disappears and we seem to be in the very presence of enormity. These necessary ingratitudes I have just expressed are part and parcel of my much larger gratitude to Steven Spielberg for making this movie. Though the best, alas, is always the enemy of the good, Schindler's List is very good indeed. It is splendid.
