A trainload of female Jewish factory workers arrives at Auschwitz. The women are shorn of their hair, stripped and herded into showers. The doors are bolted, the lights fail, the women huddle in panic, casting stricken faces toward the ceiling. This time, the ceilings do not pour forth death, only water.
It is a powerful set piece, and audiences willing to sit through "Schindler's List," a three-hour black-and-white feature film about a German businessman who saved 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust, will not quickly forget it. The scene is also vintage Spielberg. The childlike sense of wonder invoked by this momentary and unexpected deliverance echoes the jaw-dropping marvel of the Mothership landing in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and the first sight of the dinosaurs in "Jurassic Park." But here, that approach is part of the problem.
"Schindler's List" has indisputable integrity and craft. Unprecedented pains have been taken to recreate wartime Cracow. Spielberg has afforded the cinematically unimaginable a reality that nearly whisks it out of human history and onto the movie screen. This is admirable, and not even Spielberg's anachronistic resort to Naomi Shemer's 1967 anthem "Jerusalem of Gold" during the film's otherwise touching coda set at the end of the war, can detract from the achievement.
But as with UFOs and dinosaurs and California suburbs, Spielberg can't seem to resist turning the Holocaust into another elaborate, overpowering, all-consuming Swiss watch. While the director loses himself in its technical intricacies, the rest of us are left knowing less about Oskar Schindler than we should, and possibly more about Spielberg than we'd like.
Schindler, in the movie as in the 1982 book by Thomas Keneally on which it was based, was no saint. The man began the war as a Nazi, a war profiteer, and an exploiter of slave labor. At the movie's midpoint, though, Schindler is turned from the Dark Side. Invading the gorgeously maintained black-and-white backdrop with an unseemly flash of color the red dress of a young Jewish girl during a scene in which the SS rout the Jews of Cracow for transport to the camps, Spielberg suggests that Schindler underwent his volte-face because he was repulsed by the depths of Nazi cruelty. But that does not sufficiently convince. Refined lovers of Goethe and Bach who were pillars of the community had little difficulty reverting to barbarism. An entire continent followed suit. Why not Oskar Schindler? Better not ask; you won't find the answer here.
"Schindler's List" might have overcome this problem by spending more time with the title character; Liam Neeson's weighty performance leaves no doubt he would have responded appropriately to the added attention. But Spielberg is more interested in exploring the alien universe of the Holocaust through his own eyes than through those of Schindler. He does so by having the camera follow people who, whatever their heroism, ingenuity or depravity, never emerge as fully realized characters.
This is a big problem in movies about the Holocaust. The event itself appears to be best served by documentaries like "Shoah," which achieved its power from a cascade of banal words and images spoken by plain people. In contrast feature films, even epics, require a tight focus on characters and their relationships. "The Diary of Anne Frank," for example, worked so well because the camera couldn't stray out of a single room and away from the few people in it.
In "Schindler's List," the Jewish victims seem interchangeable in their misery. There are too many of them, they come and go and live and die, most usually according to the whims of the moment and the event. By careening about in this capricious fashion, they help drive home one of Spielberg's key themes that here was a game with no rules, and that surviving it often had little to do with any rational course of action. But though this may indeed have been true of the Holocaust itself, this inconstancy helps undermine the movie.
Ironically, Ralph Fiennes's portrayal of the unhinged labor camp commandant Amon Goeth is the only performance in the film that achieves some depth. In his novel, Keneally described Schindler as a walking safe haven. The movie affords the audience no such harbor in the storm, and sadly there is no one else to hang on to. Sheli Teitelbaum / Los Angeles Liam Neeson in Schindler's List': Jaw- dropping wonder and a lack of depth