The Crossing
SCHINDLER'S LIST
Reviewed by Matt Brown
March 9 2004
Memory is the spirit and soul of Schindler's List, so before I even attempt to review such an unreviewable film, let's begin with three of my own memories.
A few years ago, I was speaking to my doctor and Schindler's List came up, and I began to describe what it had meant to me in my life. He listened to me speak for several moments before putting down his pen and asking, "Are you Jewish?" I stopped. "No," I replied. We moved on to another subject.
When I was in my late teens, my parents bought me the deluxe boxed Schindler's List set (on VHS) for my birthday. This particular action, for reasons I have never been particularly able to decipher, was extraordinarily resonant to me. It was some kind of acceptance of the core of my then-volatile teenaged personality. It was a bridge across the generation gap during some exceedingly troubled times in my family life, and long after the demise of my entire VHS collection, that box is still one of my favourite things, still sitting on my shelf.
When the film was released to theatres, on December 15th, 1993, there was no question in Mark's or my mind that we would go to the theatre together, on opening day, with the same dedication to the event that we would level against Jurassic Park or any other Spielberg event movie. But please understand: we did not, for a second, think we were in for such a shallow experience. Without even speaking about it, we knew that this was something else, and we knew this was going to change the board for us completely. We went anyway. We didn't fear it. Schindler's List had within it the power to change the way we looked at cinema: at its potential, its power, and its heart. Mark and I were filmmakers before Schindler's List, and we were filmmakers afterwards. Literally: we made Stanley's Christmas Carol only a handful of days after that first screening. But from that project onward, things were forever changed. We kept making comedies, but we were in love with, and understood, cinema in a whole new way.
That's the great paradox at the heart of Schindler's List - it doesn't destroy me. It lifts me up, it fires a glow in my heart that has not dimmed in the 10+ years since its release. It fills me with hope and wonder, not unlike the best of of Spielberg's previous, more fantastical work. It is a film of extraordinary beauty... which may be its single greatest achievement.
Understand me: Schindler's List does not make the horror beautiful. The events that unfold in Schindler's List are uniformly terrifying, ugly, and horrific... yet the film lets the beauty of horror's tiny defeats shine through. It finds the cracks in the wall, the shafts of light in the permeating dark. It is so achingly human, so frail yet resilient. It is mesmerizingly, wondrously beautiful.
And vile. And destroying. And so terribly, terribly sad. Schindler's List has within it the power to fill the soul with cold, to make it so that we feel as though we will never feel warmth again. Watching Schindler's List is watching a great darkness spread - across the screen, across our faces. As the colour bleeds out of the film in the remarkable first sequence, a 3-hour-plus winter settles over our hearts. The film moves quietly, easing into the night, until the ghetto raid is unfolding before our eyes, entirely too fast - it always felt so fast. There's a long sequence after the ghetto raid proper, where the last of the jews are hiding beneath the floorboards, afraid to even breathe, while the nazis scour the depths of the ghetto, searching for the final survivors. There is a silence there, so enormous that it is beyond deafening. It is the sound of a universal audience holding its breath along with the characters, and when the scene is done, everything is changed, and nothing will ever be good again.
But it is. Here we see Ben Kingsley racing back and forth on registration day, trying to ease the passage into night that he understands among few others. Here we see Embeth Davidtz, wet and dripping and shivering, trying not to fear the rape she knows is coming. Here we see Liam Neeson, in a lengthy series of single moments which both illuminate character and deepen the mystery of Oskar Schindler, as he slowly realizes not only that he is going to do something to thwart the nazis, but that he has already been doing it; that he has always been doing it.
And so the concentration camp lorded over by Amon Goeth becomes less a space than an idea, an unplottable labyrinth which all of our characters - Oskar, Itzhak, Helen, Poldek - must navigate, regardless of which side of the fence they are on. Goeth himself must navigate it - for the first time in his career, Spielberg gives us a villain who is not evil simply because he is a nazi, but is a truly evil man, whom nazism gave an excuse. The camp destroys Goeth as handily as any of its other victims, and here too lies the great meaning that Spielberg is brave enough to unfold. Ralph Fiennes is startling in the role, travelling a road which, perhaps, no actor before or since has trod with such single-minded dedication.
Observe blood, here; observe snow. Observe bread and diamonds and soot and ash; observe the almost fetishistic dedication to texture and contrast that is invested in every frame of this film. For a film that seems to try so desperately to put at least one veil of distance between its subject and the audience - through the use of black and white - Schindler's List achieves the exact opposite effect. It takes the colour out of the rest of the world, and pulls us inside this monochrome existence; everything is tactile, everything is right in front of us. It manages to be more real, more present, than anything else. From the gunshots to the stifled sobs, I have never heard a more penetrating sound design in any film. I have never heard John Williams music like this, and I wish he'd write more of it. It becomes the tether, pulling our hearts through the film intact, in spite of all that we are seeing.
And it just becomes endless. At three and a half hours, it is both the longest and the fastest film I have ever seen, a seemingly unstoppable parade of storylines and anecdotes, sometimes episodic and vulgar, sometimes hopeful and serene. The film does not rely on narrative or story or character arc; it happens all at once, and it happens forever. It's happening now.
With the loose, documentarian style, Spielberg managed the greatest trick of his career - he turned the height of his craft into a running argument against form, and made the audiences and the critics believe that artlessness was at work here. It isn't. It can't be. There are too many connections here, too many rays of light shining out from the screen, too much evidence that every single person who worked on this film was an artist at the height of their game, fully connected to the material and its importance, fully willing to embrace the darkness, in order to save us. The great artists are always martyrs, and Schindler's List bloodied its participants, and saved the rest of us.