Schindler's List

4/4

Starring: Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley, Ralph Fiennes, Caroline Goodall, Embeth Davidtz

Rated R for Language, Some Sexuality and Actuality Violence

6,000,000.  Six million Jewish people were murdered during what has infamously become known as the Holocaust.  Numbers on the page of a history book or spoken by a narrator do little to express the magnitude of those whose lives were taken from them simply because of their faith.  With "Schindler's List," director Steven Spielberg does what that cannot: put faces behind the number.

Oskar Schindler (Neeson) is the man who has everything.  In a time of war, pleasurable goods like good wine and fruit are hard to come by, but Schindler can get it for you.  Like all businessmen, he makes money for a living.  He wants to open up a factory to profit from the war, and he wants to use Jews to run it because they're cheap.  He hires a Jewish man named Itzhak Stern (Kingsley) to run the factory while Schindler himself will make sure that the Nazis use his factory to buy their pots and pans.  But when he sees what is happening to the people that work for him, his motives change from selfish to selfless.

Schindler is a complex man.  He's the PT Barnum of businissmen.  He doesn't do any actual work other than schmoozing powerful (and loaded) men.  He doesn't just believe his own press, he creates it.  He's also a skilled manipulator, especially those who are too filled with hate and propaganda to realize that they're being conned.  One of these men is Amon Goeth (Fiennes), the psychopathic guard at the camp near where Schindler has built his factory.  Goeth has control of the workers and is smart enough to know that Schindler is up to something, but not smart enough to know what it is or that he's being conned.  An example of this is when Schindler convinces him to stop shooting the prisoners for sport.

From top to bottom, the cast is exceptional.  Liam Neeson, an Irish actor who took on the challenge of bringing this fascinating man to life.  He ably and evenly shifts the character from a greedy jerk to a desperate protector.  He's intelligent and charismatic.  It's easy to believe that Schindler could take convince anyone to do anything.  Especially a fool like Goeth.  As Goeth, Fiennes is truly chilling.  He uses his cold eyes to great effect, and commits murder so callously that it stops us dead in our tracks.  Goeth is a study of the nature of evil and hate, and it's effective because he and Spielberg don't allow him to turn into a caricature.  They use his Jewish servant, Helen Hirsch (Davidtz) as a way to explore what little humanity he has.  He's attracted and infatuated with her, which disgusts him (and Schindler is able to use his obsession with her to his own advantage).  Ben Kingsley, the great actor that he is, cedes the spotlight to Neeson and Fiennes, but his contribution to the film is huge.  It is mainly through him that Schindler sees the Jewish people as human beings rather than cheap labor.  The rest of the cast is top notch as well.

Apart from the score by John Williams, this film in no way shape or form resembles anything Steven Spielberg had done up to that point.  Known primarily as the king of popcorn entertainment with the likes of the Indiana Jones movies and "ET," "Schindler's List" was his most ambitious and serious minded effort.  It's an epic film about a forever timely subject, and it is as complex as it should be.

Interestingly enough, Spielberg almost didn't make the movie.  Producer Sid Sheinberg brought the book upon which the film is based to Spielberg in 1982, hoping that the promising new director would make a movie out of it someday.  Spielberg didn't think he could do the story justice so he shopped the project around to the likes of his friend Martin Scorcese (who thought a Jewish director should do it), Roman Polanski (who lost family in the Holocaust and wasn't ready to tackle the subject) and Billy Wilder (who was retired, and was the one who ultimately convinced Spielberg to direct the film).  Neeson also wasn't the first choice for Schindler, either.  Harrison Ford was offered the part, but turned it down because he thought that his star power would overshadow the importance of the project.  Mel Gibson and Kevin Costner offered to take the role but were turned down for the same reason.

The message of the film is also the tagline, a passage from the Talmud: Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.  This is true, but what truly impressed me, at least on this third viewing, is that it's a study in how personal interaction cuts through propaganda and ambivalence.  If you see someone's name on a piece of paper, it's just a name.  But if you meet them and spend time talking to them, that name becomes a person.