Schindler's List *****

I understand it’s a true story. At the end of the movie, a large, brooding man stands before a crowd of Jews during a ceremony in Jerusalem, honoring him as a “Righteous Person.” Everyone is there to honor him. Before he starts his speech, the man looks at a silver watch on his wrist with the stretched bands. He pulls the watch off and looks at it.

“I could have saved one with this. I could have saved one more.”

As his eyes tear up, he pulls off the golden ring off his left hand – off his ring finger. After staring at it for a couple of second, the tears run down his cheeks and he said to the crowd, but more to himself, “I could have save another with this. I had this then. I could have saved another.”

There’s an old saying in athletics – great teams aren’t always great; they’re just great when they have to be. The line can be used for humanity as well. People aren’t always great; they’re just great when they have to be.

Oskar Schindler wasn’t great before 1939 and he wasn’t great after 1945. He was just great when he had to be.

The chief goal of the human race is perfection. That goal has never been achieved and probably never will. This is a bad thing I guess for our people, but a good thing for literature. Perfect people are boring. Take Shakespeare for example – King Lear was not perfect, Hamlet was not perfect, and Richard III was sure as hell not perfect. Great literature is about people overcoming personnel defects and worldly obstacles. Without that drama, great fiction could not exist.

For many years, certainly when I was alive, this man did not get his due by a long shot, but it appears because of Thomas Keneally majestic book, Steven Zaillian’s beautiful screenplay, Steven Spielberg’s brilliant film and Liam Neeson’s chilling performance, he will not be not be forgotten.

Schindler’s List is about as perfect a movie as there is. The acting is superlative; the camera work is remarkable and you could tell Spielberg was feeling this.

For those who don’t know (and shame on you if you don’t), here’s the story. Oskar Schindler was a member of the Nazi party by convenience only. He didn’t like what they were doing, but he saw a business opportunity here. To borrow Zallian’s line, “I finally figured out what I needed to be a success. War.” Schindler owned an enamel factory that produced pots and pans and others items for the German war machine.

One of the first executives he hired was Itzhak Stern, a Jewish accountant (playing so brilliantly by Ben Kingsley that I didn’t even recognize him; it actually took me two screenings to realize that it was Ghandi). Stern took the opportunity to convince his boss to hire as many of his doomed race as possible to save them from the gas chamber. At great risk to both of them, Jews of various abilities were saved from the gas chamber by these heroic men. I’m not a big fan of the adjective heroic since it is so over used, but in this case it doesn’t say enough. At the end of the way, Schindler save about 1,100 Jews from execution.

The story itself is dramatic enough, but it is the little touches that Zaillian and Spielberg add that make this film truly great. How better to describe the horrors of the Nazis that to have a bunch of Jewish women in a gas chamber waiting for execution only to have water spill out of the spigots instead of the noxious fumes? How about Neeson sitting on horseback while watching Jews being herded into carts destined for the concentration camps agonizing what his country is doing? There’s also the brutal scene where Amon Goeth, the sadistic Nazi (sorry for the oxymoron) played memorably by Ralph Finnes, stood on his balcony, bare-chested, gut hanging out, with a rifle on his shoulder, picking off people below him.

With all that in mind, my favorite scene was when Oskar met one of Stern’s recent hires for the assembly line and realized that he only had one arm. As you read this dialogue, keep in mind that company’s like Schindler’s were only allowed to hire “useful” Jews, so this man, if caught, might have put the whole operation in jeopardy.

“The man only has one arm,” Schindler told his accountant.

“He’s very useful,” Stern said as he tries to walk away.

“He only has one arm!” Schindler said incredulously as he chases after his assistant.

“Very useful.”

In many films, you can tell who the driving force was, but as I’ve discovered over the decades, with the truly great films, there are many driving performers. In the case of this film, there’s Zaillian’s script, Janusz Kamiński’s haunting black and white photography, the great acting, Michael Kahn’s smooth editing, and so on.

The great directors, like Scorsese, Lubitsch, and many others, can credit to their success the ability to hire good and appropriate people for each job, and then guide them to their vision while mostly staying out of their way. Spielberg has not always been able to do this, but here he did. And it shows.

With all that said, the main reason this movie achieved greatness is the subject matter for whom history finally paid his due. Let me put it this way – I see Oskar up here. I don’t see Amon Goeth.