Schindler's List (Spielberg, '93)
Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.
A match suddenly sparks to life in a dark room, lighting a candle with a small, fragile flame, as a Hasidic family begins to pray around the dinner table, preparing for their Sabbath dinner. As the candle burns down to a smoldering heap, all the color is slowly drained away until it becomes a cold, stark black-&-white, before the whisper of smoke is abruptly replaced by the towering black cloud erupting from a train, as we're suddenly transported back in time to the dawn of World War II in Poland. And, as the invading Nazi troops force Jewish citizens nationwide to crowd into a few cramped ghettoes in the cities, and coldly, bureaucratically "register" them for what would become their eventual annihilation, we witness the scene being set for the unspeakable horrors of The Holocaust, which we will spend the next 3+ hours exploring in Steven Spielberg's masterful historical drama Schindler's List, what I personally consider to the best movie from a man who is (obviously) one of the most iconic directors in Hollywood history, and who, to be perfectly honest with you, made what is quite possibly my favorite movie of all time.
It tells the true story of Oskar Schindler (portrayed by Liam Neeson in a magnificently humane performance), a German businessman and swastika-wearing member of the Nazi party who initially sought to profit from exploiting the "free" Jewish labor available to his factories during The Holocaust, but, through the process of witnessing the pure, unrelenting evil of the genocide firsthand, eventually seeks to save the lives of his workers, and eventually, by spending his entire fortune bribing Nazi officials, ends up rescuing 1,200 people from a certain death.
But, to imply that List is nothing more than a straightfoward biopic of its title character, or some sort of unblemished, secular canonization of a modern-day saint is doing a grave disservice to Spielberg's masterfully balanced storytelling, as, rather than seeking to whitewash the more unflattering aspects of Schindler's persona, Spielberg instead magnifies them, focusing on his brazen womanizing, his disgusting wining-and-dining of prominent, high-ranking Nazi officials, or the grotesque manner that he initially seeks to profit off of the occupation, when he brags about how wealthy his enslaved laborers has made him. In addition to that, we also view Schindler's flaws through the outside lenses of a number of other characters throughout the film, such as his wife's frustrations with his constant adultery, to the point where maître d′s just assume that she's another one of his numerous mistresses when they see her, or the way that Schindler's personal accountant Itzahk Stern serves as the stubborn, resilient manifestation of his boss's initially non-existent conscience, outright refusing at all to indulge in Oskar's celebrations of his own war profiteering.
But, rather than turning us as an audience against him, this warts-and-all approach instead greatly humanizes Schindler, so that, as we witness his slow, gradual change of heart over the course of the film, instead of being elevated over us, he seems so much more fallible and real instead, showing us the ways that great, world-changing acts are always undertaken by people who are, in the end, as fundamentally flawed as any of us.
And of course, all of Schindler's exploitations end up paling far, far in comparison to his ultimate mirror image, camp commandant Amon Goethe, masterfully portrayed in a soul-chilling performance from Ralph Finnes, who gives one of the greatest villainous performances in film history for a man whose existence was the definition of pure evil, whose sheer, icy malice and soullessness is proven time and time again from his abrupt, senseless murders of random innocent people in his camp for "fun", the way he regularly terrifies and beats his housemaid to a pulp (a cover for his own self-rage at being attracted to a Jewish woman), and even the brief stretch of the film where it seems like he's considering becoming more merciful (which was brought about merely because Schindler temporarily convinces him that restraint is a way of showing "true" power over his prisoners) is quickly ended when he embraces his true self, and shoots a Jewish boy in the head for failing to cleaning his bathtub properly.
But, to also imply that List is nothing more than a simple tale of historical good vs. evil as represented by its main villain/protagonist is again, to do the film disservice, specifically its screenplay (which was rewritten at one point to more prominently emphasize the Jewish characters and their perspectives), as it achieves a basically perfect trade-off between the personal and historical, displaying unspeakably visceral individual horrors like a family having to swallow their own diamond rings in order to conceal an amount of wealth from the Nazi regime, or a man being forced to stand and wait as everyone else around him is randomly shot in order to force a certain confession out of him, or a child having to escape from a sure death by hiding in a pool of human filth down inside of an outhouse (where there are already other children cowering in fear).
But, at the same time, the film balances these individual experiences out by remembering the overall mass of humanity who suffered and by exploring various facets of the overall genocide whenever it can, whether it be the conversations that show Jewish people minimizing their persecution by choosing to believe that it can't get any worse, the way they refused to believe that they were being wiped out with the rationalization that they were the "essential work force" for the Nazis, or a particular sequence in Auschwitz that concludes with a lingering shot of a line of people being calmly herded like lambs to the slaughter towards one of the camp's infamous "shower" facilities, a shot which includes a particularly ominous billow of smoke arising as the result of the flames of that human-made Hell, one of many sobering reminders in the film that, although it's about the story of 1,200 people that were saved from The Holocaust, the vast majority of European Jews were far, far less fortunate.
And finally, stylistically, Schindler's List surpasses feeling like the historical reenactment that it fundamentally it is, and even goes farther than having the relative intimacy of a documentary, as cinematographer Janusz Kamiński balances the potential distancing effect of his crisp, period appropriate black-and-white imagery (which I find only adds to the overall starkness of the experience anyway) with his usage of intense close-ups, point-of-view angles, and disorienting, unstable handheld cameras to make us feel like we're actually there, personally experiencing the many depicted horrors, as SS men shout in our faces for us to present our papers, we line up for "inspections" to see whether we're judged worthy to live, and the ashes of our cremated brethren fall on us from the heavens, like a demented, out-of-season snowfall.
Even at over 3 hours long, the fact that the film ever ends still ends up making it feel far too short anyway, as it's such an intensely visceral telling of one of the most traumatic chapters in human history that the raw emotion depicted within more than justify whatever occasional Spielberg-ian sentimentalities that exist in it, as List ceases to play out like a mere "movie" at all, and just feels like pure... experience, placed onscreen as a warning to never let such horrors repeat themselves, a lesson humanity has sadly proven itself all to eager to forget. However, towards the absolutely heart-rending end of the film, as a character quotes the now-famous line from the Talmud, "Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire", we can't help but be reminded that, although this world will always contain evil and people willing to commit it, one person's actions can make all the difference in that world, at least, that is, to the people their lives touch.
Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.
A match suddenly sparks to life in a dark room, lighting a candle with a small, fragile flame, as a Hasidic family begins to pray around the dinner table, preparing for their Sabbath dinner. As the candle burns down to a smoldering heap, all the color is slowly drained away until it becomes a cold, stark black-&-white, before the whisper of smoke is abruptly replaced by the towering black cloud erupting from a train, as we're suddenly transported back in time to the dawn of World War II in Poland. And, as the invading Nazi troops force Jewish citizens nationwide to crowd into a few cramped ghettoes in the cities, and coldly, bureaucratically "register" them for what would become their eventual annihilation, we witness the scene being set for the unspeakable horrors of The Holocaust, which we will spend the next 3+ hours exploring in Steven Spielberg's masterful historical drama Schindler's List, what I personally consider to the best movie from a man who is (obviously) one of the most iconic directors in Hollywood history, and who, to be perfectly honest with you, made what is quite possibly my favorite movie of all time.
It tells the true story of Oskar Schindler (portrayed by Liam Neeson in a magnificently humane performance), a German businessman and swastika-wearing member of the Nazi party who initially sought to profit from exploiting the "free" Jewish labor available to his factories during The Holocaust, but, through the process of witnessing the pure, unrelenting evil of the genocide firsthand, eventually seeks to save the lives of his workers, and eventually, by spending his entire fortune bribing Nazi officials, ends up rescuing 1,200 people from a certain death.
But, to imply that List is nothing more than a straightfoward biopic of its title character, or some sort of unblemished, secular canonization of a modern-day saint is doing a grave disservice to Spielberg's masterfully balanced storytelling, as, rather than seeking to whitewash the more unflattering aspects of Schindler's persona, Spielberg instead magnifies them, focusing on his brazen womanizing, his disgusting wining-and-dining of prominent, high-ranking Nazi officials, or the grotesque manner that he initially seeks to profit off of the occupation, when he brags about how wealthy his enslaved laborers has made him. In addition to that, we also view Schindler's flaws through the outside lenses of a number of other characters throughout the film, such as his wife's frustrations with his constant adultery, to the point where maître d′s just assume that she's another one of his numerous mistresses when they see her, or the way that Schindler's personal accountant Itzahk Stern serves as the stubborn, resilient manifestation of his boss's initially non-existent conscience, outright refusing at all to indulge in Oskar's celebrations of his own war profiteering.
But, rather than turning us as an audience against him, this warts-and-all approach instead greatly humanizes Schindler, so that, as we witness his slow, gradual change of heart over the course of the film, instead of being elevated over us, he seems so much more fallible and real instead, showing us the ways that great, world-changing acts are always undertaken by people who are, in the end, as fundamentally flawed as any of us.
And of course, all of Schindler's exploitations end up paling far, far in comparison to his ultimate mirror image, camp commandant Amon Goethe, masterfully portrayed in a soul-chilling performance from Ralph Finnes, who gives one of the greatest villainous performances in film history for a man whose existence was the definition of pure evil, whose sheer, icy malice and soullessness is proven time and time again from his abrupt, senseless murders of random innocent people in his camp for "fun", the way he regularly terrifies and beats his housemaid to a pulp (a cover for his own self-rage at being attracted to a Jewish woman), and even the brief stretch of the film where it seems like he's considering becoming more merciful (which was brought about merely because Schindler temporarily convinces him that restraint is a way of showing "true" power over his prisoners) is quickly ended when he embraces his true self, and shoots a Jewish boy in the head for failing to cleaning his bathtub properly.
But, to also imply that List is nothing more than a simple tale of historical good vs. evil as represented by its main villain/protagonist is again, to do the film disservice, specifically its screenplay (which was rewritten at one point to more prominently emphasize the Jewish characters and their perspectives), as it achieves a basically perfect trade-off between the personal and historical, displaying unspeakably visceral individual horrors like a family having to swallow their own diamond rings in order to conceal an amount of wealth from the Nazi regime, or a man being forced to stand and wait as everyone else around him is randomly shot in order to force a certain confession out of him, or a child having to escape from a sure death by hiding in a pool of human filth down inside of an outhouse (where there are already other children cowering in fear).
But, at the same time, the film balances these individual experiences out by remembering the overall mass of humanity who suffered and by exploring various facets of the overall genocide whenever it can, whether it be the conversations that show Jewish people minimizing their persecution by choosing to believe that it can't get any worse, the way they refused to believe that they were being wiped out with the rationalization that they were the "essential work force" for the Nazis, or a particular sequence in Auschwitz that concludes with a lingering shot of a line of people being calmly herded like lambs to the slaughter towards one of the camp's infamous "shower" facilities, a shot which includes a particularly ominous billow of smoke arising as the result of the flames of that human-made Hell, one of many sobering reminders in the film that, although it's about the story of 1,200 people that were saved from The Holocaust, the vast majority of European Jews were far, far less fortunate.
And finally, stylistically, Schindler's List surpasses feeling like the historical reenactment that it fundamentally it is, and even goes farther than having the relative intimacy of a documentary, as cinematographer Janusz Kamiński balances the potential distancing effect of his crisp, period appropriate black-and-white imagery (which I find only adds to the overall starkness of the experience anyway) with his usage of intense close-ups, point-of-view angles, and disorienting, unstable handheld cameras to make us feel like we're actually there, personally experiencing the many depicted horrors, as SS men shout in our faces for us to present our papers, we line up for "inspections" to see whether we're judged worthy to live, and the ashes of our cremated brethren fall on us from the heavens, like a demented, out-of-season snowfall.
Even at over 3 hours long, the fact that the film ever ends still ends up making it feel far too short anyway, as it's such an intensely visceral telling of one of the most traumatic chapters in human history that the raw emotion depicted within more than justify whatever occasional Spielberg-ian sentimentalities that exist in it, as List ceases to play out like a mere "movie" at all, and just feels like pure... experience, placed onscreen as a warning to never let such horrors repeat themselves, a lesson humanity has sadly proven itself all to eager to forget. However, towards the absolutely heart-rending end of the film, as a character quotes the now-famous line from the Talmud, "Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire", we can't help but be reminded that, although this world will always contain evil and people willing to commit it, one person's actions can make all the difference in that world, at least, that is, to the people their lives touch.