It is ironic that Universal has released Steven Spielberg’s most celebrated film—his adaptation of Thomas Keneally’s fine non-fiction novel, Schindler’s Ark—at this moment in time, for its subject, the Holocaust in Europe, has been very much in the news lately, thanks to Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ and Hutton Gibson’s, Mel’s father’s, delightful sense of humor about the War against the Jews.
      According to Hutton, the Holocaust is almost entirely fictitious. (“Do you know how much gasoline it would take to burn six million bodies?”) And according to his son’s film, the Jews killed Christ and “His blood be on [them], and [their] children.” Though the Vatican renounced the “blood libel” in Nostra Aetate and expressly forbade the catechizing or preaching of anti-Semitism, the charge of deicide is repeated in The Passion, literally, in untranslated Aramaic, and figuratively, in the way that Gibson chooses and presents his Biblical and non-Biblical sources. (I will have a good deal more to say about this when The Passion is released on DVD.)
      I mention Gibson’s passion play in the context of Schindler’s List because of the interesting parallels between the two films. Schindler is usually seen as a “Jewish” epic tragedy, and it surely and unforgettably encapsulates the terrible fate that befell Polish Jews during the Second World War—a fate, by the way, that two millennia of rabidly anti-Semitic passion plays helped seal. And yet its subject isn’t just the suffering of Jews but the way one gentile responded to that suffering.
      Though there is no dogma—either Jewish or Christian—in Schindler, which is humanistic rather than theological in its approach to the Holocaust, Oskar Schindler de facto acts out Christ’s words in Matthew 7:12, and in so doing saves hundreds of men and women who otherwise would have been murdered in those concentration camps where, according to Hutton Gibson, the Nazis killed nary a soul. One could, in fact, argue that Schindler is more of an instance of the power and glory of the Gospels than The Passion of the Christ, though one could not argue it with Gibson or his father, both of whom would reject the humanism of Schindler as the very sort of mongrelization or Judaization of Christianity (I can scarcely believe I’m using these phrases at the start of the twenty-first century), which they find so repugnant. One thing is inarguable: Schindler is an incomparably better movie than Gibson’s, in every respect.
      The first word spoken in Schindler’s List comes in the form of a question: “Name?” Though Spielberg habitually works at a gut-level, seldom pitching his films on a plane that calls for close reading, this initial question—and the answers that the oh-so-efficient Nazi bureaucrats record on neat typewritten forms, from those thousands of Jews lined up in front of them at Krakow railroad stations late in 1939—has been chosen deliberately, for nearly all those people will lose their individual identities. Their names will soon be turned into numbers, and from numbers tattooed on human flesh into nothingness, into smoke and ash. Almost all of those thousands upon thousands of men and women—all different, all alike in one fatal regard—will perish horribly, save for the few, who, by God’s grace and the goodness of one flawed man—a gentile, a notorious Gauner (swindler, sharpie) and womanizer, a Nazi Party member—find their names typed on another list. Schindler’s list.
      Oskar Schindler, as most of you already know, was a Sudeten German (Czech) industrialist, a war-time “carpetbagger,” who came to Krakow, Poland, in 1939, to make his fortune. Though the movie sets his fateful meeting with Itzhak Stern (like Schindler, a real person, an important Polish Jew, who was the chief accountant of a Krakow import-export firm prior to the War and was to become Oskar Schindler’s accountant, amanuensis, and, at least in the film, voice of reason and conscience) at the Krakow Judenrat (Jewish Council), where Schindler makes a dramatic public entrance suitable for the movies, they in fact first met privately through Stern’s boss, a Treuhander (a German who had “Aryanized” a formerly Jewish business) named Aue—an old friend of Schindler’s and, as it turned out, himself a Jew in hiding. As in the film, Schindler’s charm proved irresistible, and he won the influential Stern’s trust.
      At first Schindler manned his “Aryanized” enamel-works factory—which he had received not from an expropriated Jew but from the Court of Commercial Claims—with a mix of Poles and Jews. As demand for his goods increased, Schindler employed more Jews—by 1942, almost 400 out of a total workforce of 800. Though in the course of doing business he rubbed shoulders with Nazi brass daily (his delicate, extortionate relationship with them is conveyed both wittily and frighteningly in the film), Schindler was exceptionally good to his Jewish workers, conspiring with Stern and others to falsify records to protect the identities of those who weren’t truly qualified for industrial work, protecting those who were old or lame or sick, and bribing the German guards at his factory to turn a blind eye to all they were up to. Word soon spread among the Jewish community that Schindler’s was the factory to work at.
      With the dissolution of the Krakow ghetto in March 1943—the terror and totality of which is recreated unforgettably in Spielberg’s film—all surviving Jews were sent to the Plaszow labor camp outside the city (or to Treblinka or Majdanek for extermination). Through guile, bribery, cronyism, and pure chutzpah, Schindler managed to save “his” Jews—insisting these “highly trained” factory workers were essential to the war effort and, somehow, convincing the Nazis that this was the case. At first he organized workshops inside Plaszow. Later he arranged with the camp’s commandant, Hauptsturmfuhrer Amon Goeth, to establish his own sub-camp outside Plaszow, closer to the factory (to save time, he said, in transit).
      When in the spring of 1944, Plaszow and all other work camps were emptied in advance of the Russian Army, Schindler, at the risk of his life and the expense of almost his entire fortune, managed to save his Jews again—now nearly eleven-hundred men and women—by bribing officials to transport them to his hometown of Brnenec in the Sudetenland, where they “worked” in an armaments factory that produced nothing—not a single shell—for the war effort, safe until the liberation of Czechoslovakia by the Russian Army in the spring of 1945.
      Goodness is perhaps the most difficult subject to present in a film or a book without gross sentimentality. And though Spielberg and his scenarist Steven Zaillian have rather sentimentalized Oskar Schindler—and certainly simplified him, for he was in fact more of a risk-taker than the film allows—they have not oversentimenalized him (save, perhaps, for his dialogue in his last scene); nor have they overexplained him. Though we see the terrible circumstances that led to his heroism, and certainly share his pity for the Jews and admire his courage and selflessness in protecting them, why this particular man—this careless, charming, pleasant, crooked man—should’ve found it in his heart to do what he did, and risk what he risked, remains a mystery, although it is the kind of mystery that the world could use more instances of. His goodness is most eloquently explained by the results it effected. And the film’s most powerful and heartbreaking moment is, in fact, the long parade of Schindlerjuden in its contemporary epilogue—those survivors and children of survivors, who come to Israel to pay homage at the grave of the man without whom none would have lived. Schindler’s list of names was, as Itzhak Stern so eloquently says, an absolute good. His list was life. His goodness—perhaps all goodness—means life.
      Schindler’s List is the finest film that Steven Spielberg has made. It is also an immensely sad film—a movie that I do not return to often, because I cannot bear to. In spite of any little compunctions I have about its occasional moments of Hollywood slickness, melodramatic manipulativeness, or sentimental simplification, it is worthy of the highest praise. The actors are all superb—never again better than they were here. Though the great performances of Ralph Fiennes as the stupid, bestial Amon Goeth, and Ben Kingsley as the decent, meticulous, taciturn Itzhak Stern have been rightly celebrated, particular kudos is owed Liam Neeson who, as Oskar Schindler, gives the performance of a lifetime in the role of a lifetime. Janusz Kaminski’s Academy Award-winning black-and-white cinematography is among the finest of the sound era; Michael Kahn’s Academy Award-winning editing is just as remarkable (particularly in the near-silent dissolution-of-the-Krakow-ghetto sequence); Academy Award-winning art directors Allan Starski and Ewa Braun’s recreations of the Krakow ghetto and the various concentration camps (including, briefly but unforgettably, Auschwitz) are simply extraordinary; and Steven Zaillian’s Academy Award-winning script is deeply moving without being hokey. They and composer John Williams and Spielberg himself deserved the Academy Awards they won.
      I wish I could tell you that Universal’s transfer of this great movie is itself great, but frankly I don’t think it is. Though the grain of the film stock was deliberately exaggerated by Spielberg and Kaminski to give Schindler a vintage, documentary look, on DVD the grain is grossly exaggerated, far beyond what I remember seeing in the theater. At the same time, contrast is exaggerated, like a photographic negative printed on a “harder,” higher-grade paper. The DVD’s blacks are inky and shadow detail is often crushed; its whites are often blown; its midtones seem compressed to me. Some of this high contrast was a deliberate artistic choice, but some of its exaggeration is the result of the transfer. Happily, the sound is good.
      None of this matters. The transfer is better than serviceable, and the film (ranked the ninth best American film of all time in the AFI poll) is an indisputable masterwork. Jonathan Valin