...Spielberg is at the top of his game with this one.
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A lot of amateurs have written about how Steven Spielberg´s "Schindler´s List" is "unreviewable" because of its subject matter. That attitude is a defeatist one for two reasons:
1) Any movie--fictional or otherwise--needs to be critiqued in order to ascertain what people will gain from watching it;
2) If a movie is bad, then its subject matter can´t save it from being a waste of time. In fact, if a bad movie is about a serious subject, then it should be doubly condemned for not doing its subject justice. That being said, "Schindler´s List" is not a bad movie, and there are plenty of things to be gained from watching it.
In "Schindler´s List", Oskar Schindler (Oscar-nominated Liam Neeson), a Czech of German ethnicity (i.e. from Sudetenland), goes to Poland following the Nazis in 1939/1940 so that he can become a war profiteer. He recruits help from Jewish investors so that he can buy his own pots-and-pans factory. Initially, he uses forced Jewish labor because it´s cheaper than hiring Poles. However, as World War II and the Holocaust progresses, Schindler experiences a slow, subtle moral awakening and begins to con the Nazis as he places more than a thousand Jews under his protection. By the end of WWII, Schindler spent his entire war-generated fortune to ensure that his Jews would never again be touched by the Nazis.
Schindler´s story is an amazing one. In a cacophony of death, one man managed to save a great deal of lives using charm, bluster, and deception. The Holocaust has been described as a mechanical insanity; perhaps it took a person with unconventional ideas and a morally questionable lifestyle (Schindler loved alcohol and womanizing) to deceive the Nazis (who considered him their fun-loving pal).
Of course, if "Schindler´s List" had been an ordinarily- or badly-made film, then not many people would´ve sat through its entire three hours. However, Spielberg is at the top of his game with this one. On both technical and aesthetic levels, "Schindler´s List" is a marvel. The opening sequence alone is a fine example of superb craftsmanship. The film begins in color with a Jewish family celebrating the Sabbath. As the editing focuses on dwindling candles, Spielberg subtly switches to black-and-white film even as the light in the candles remains in color. When a candle flickers out, the camera pans upwards to follow a wisp of smoke. You hear the sounds of a train engine as the candle flickers out, and then there is a match cut to a train engine´s smoke stack. There is a sophisticated use of sounds and editing to transition from one family registering with Nazi clerks to hundreds of Jews registering in a train station. Later, non-diegetic music plays during the train station scene, and the same piece of music becomes diegetic sound when the editing finally introduces Schindler in his apartment, getting ready for a party. At the party (during which he first seduces some Nazi officials), the characters sing a song that is continued in a following shot of German soldiers marching down a street in Krakow, Poland. Spielberg´s film style and techniques absorb viewers into his story´s world without drawing attention to the artifice of filmmaking.
At the center of the film are three brilliant performances. Liam Neeson has a commanding physique that becomes a part of each of his characters. He´s very big but has a rough charm and physical grace that makes people want him to be a big-brother type. As Schindler, Neeson emphasizes the character´s quiet moral shift by pretending to be angry about losing money due to Nazi anti-human activities when in fact he´s indignant and anguished about the cruel, arbitrary terminations of life. Ralph Fiennes (also Oscar-nominated) is a chilling study in evil as Amon Goeth, the camp commandant who thinks that Schindler also finds the Holocaust to be an amusing spectacle. Finally, Ben Kingsley is memorable as a meek accountant who gently nudges Schindler towards doing the right thing.
Some have complained that the horrors depicted in "Schindler´s List" do not match the worst events that occurred during the Holocaust. While the complaint is "correct", it also misses the film´s point. "Schindler´s List" is about Oskar Schindler saving more than 1,000 Jews from the Nazis´ genocidic activities. Most of the film takes place where there aren´t any major extermination camps. When some of the characters are sent to Auschwitz, the camera stays with them--which makes sense because we´re wondering about what happened to Schindler´s Jews. Therefore, the story focuses on Jews evading death rather than on Jews dying. In a broad sense, "Schindler´s List" does not address the Holocaust´s full scale, but it still depicts the brutality of the Nazi regime (i.e. when Goeth casually shoots people from his balcony, when the camera pans from some Schindler Jews to a crematorium in Auschwitz, etc.). It´s true that "Schindler´s List" can not be described as "the definitive Holocaust film", but why should any movie be described as such anyway since no one movie can cover the whole of the Holocaust?
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[release]11570[/release]