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mw-mmmmmw«gHOLOCAUST TALES: Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson, above) is a German businessman who helps Jews avoid the death camps. At right, camp commandant Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes) searches for a housemaid.Review by HENRY SHEEHANThe Orange County Register• • «• * • * i *chindler’s List” is a massively powerful story of the Holocaust. Although the story of:the-Nazis’ campaign of genocide has been told before, Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Thomas Keneally’s fact-based novel has the shocking impact of a freshly viewed atrocity.Yet, for all the film’s truly horrific sequences — from the roundup of Krakow’s Jews to the everyday crimes of the Plaszow labor camp to the nightmarish, industrialized mass murder * of Auschwitz — “Schindler’s List” is not just a horror show.In turning from fantasy-adven-ture to historical tragedy, director Spielberg has brought a familiar narrow-focus psychological intensity to bear on his unlikely hero, Oskar Schindler, a man who set out to be an exploiter but ended up a savior.This is a movie that succeeds brilliantly not just in bringing a terrible chapter in history back to life, but in meticulously depicting the processes throughwhich a self-obsessed and imma-. «ture man becomes integrated and responsible. And how any sense of morality in Schindler’s time and place demanded some sort of response.The story, which unwinds in slightly more than three hours, is long and involved. Schindler (Liam Neeson) was an ethnic German from Czechoslovakia. A hustler and entrepreneur, he saw the German invasion of Poland as an opportunity to make millions, so he joined the Nazi party, and set to wining and dining par-'Schindler's List'► Stars: Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley, Ralph Fiennes► Behind the scenes: Directed by Steven Spielberg; screenplay by Ste-' ven Zaillian from a novel by Thomas Keneally; produced by Spielberg, Ger aid R. Molen, Brankd Lustig► Playing: Opens today at selecttheaters around Los Angeles. '► Running time: 3 hours 5 minutes► Rating: R for scenes of historical horrors and some nudity and sexual situations► Grade: A► Bottom line: A story of a hustler who becomes a hero told with passion and insightr \ •ty officials and army officers, winning valuable contracts in the process.Schindler’s problem was that although he had the orders, he didn’t have the resources or skill to fill them; he was basically a salesman. So he turned to the Jews of Krakow, sealed up by the Nazis in an impromptu ghetto — thousands of families in 16 square blocks. To secure an enamelware factory seized from its Jewish owners, Schindler raised money from Jewish businessmen, contracted with the state to hire Jewish labor and harnessed the expertise of a Jewish factory manager, Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley), who, in the film at least, also became his conscience. He named the business Deutsche Emailware Fa-brik, or Emalia.Then something happened to this high-flying exploiter. The destruction of the Krakow ghetto, a bloody and murderous affair of bottomless barbarity — during which the Emalia workers were transferred from the ghetto to the labor camp at Plaszow —-shook something within his calculating soul. He transformed Emalia into a haven, and increasing , numbers, Jewishmen, women and children wereadded to the company’s evermore padded employment- rolls as skilled labor, a designation that kept them out of death camps.Schindler began to expend his capital not on machinery but on bribes to officials who could add Jews to his workforce. He cozied up to Plaszow’s commandant, Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes), working to mitigate his cruelties however he could.As the situation became more dire, Schindler’s bravery became more pronounced, climaxing near the war’s end with a heart-stopping episode triggered when 300 women and girls were shipped not to a final work site in Czechoslovakia as Schindler planned, but to blood- and smoke-smeared Auschwitz.Part of the movie’s value is in the way it re-establishes the historical record. Inspired by photos of the Holocaust, Spielberg shot “Schindler’s List”, for the most part in black and white. There’s a documentary quality to the photography sharply contrasting the lushly composed images of his previous films.Historical incidents are dramatized with daring detail. The liquidation of the Krakow ghetto smacks the viewer, with such # force in large part because.Spielberg stays with it so long, from the morning assault by German army troops through the roundup of families and on-the-spot executions of resisters to the nighttime visit of death squads who murdered those who had managed to hide during the day.But there’s a subjective element that is just as important. The Krakow atrocity is witnessed by Schindler, who stumbles upon it during a morning horseback ride on a bluff overlooking the city. It’s his gaze that is reflected in the single stroke of color in the scene, a dash of red on a little girl’s dress. That red is an eloquent visual signal of Schindler’s dawning awareness that the Germans wouldn’t be acting this way if they didn’t plan to murder every Jew, either now or later.Although it has an unpredictable structure and occasional lapse of rhythm, “Schindler’s List” also has some brilliant nar-brative strategies, nearly all of which have moral implications, particularly in the way they follow one group of Jews through the whole story. Because the Holocaust is the accumulation of millions upon millions of individual crimes, perpetrators and victims, it is tough to give due regard to each story without slighting the sheer mass of them, or depicting the scale without diminishing the individual.“Schindler’s List” finds that middle ground that acknowledges both the suffering of one human being and the tragic, multiplying scope of the Holocaust. And so when the film ends on its note of relief, rescue and even triumph, it is filled with a hard-fought joy repeated a thousand# • V * » r ■ / * * * 4 : ^ :* * .» w. - f .. • •. i ■*times over.
Newspaper Details
Santa Ana Orange County Register
Santa Ana, California, US
Wed, Dec 15, 1993
Page 99
Full Page
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USA 14 Apr 2021
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