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Making History Hollywood Style
Steven Spielberg remakes Schindler in his own image.
For better or worse, movies are the closest thing we've got to a cultural Rorshak test. Like Rorshak's inkblots, movies are infinitely interpretable, and the way we view a given film often tells us more about ourselves than it does about the film in question. So it follows that when a filmmaker manages to tap into our deepest emotions as a society, he's telling us an awful lot about our cultural psychology.In recent weeks, just about everyone I know has been talking about Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List, and what a great film it is. One particularly cynical friend, who has never been a fan of Spielberg's particular brand of schmaltz, and who is also one of the most insightful film critics I know came out of the film saying, "Well, I guess pigs can fly." Now, I've never been a big Spielberg fan either, but I admired his two previous efforts at adult filmmaking (The Color Purple and Empire of the Sun), and I'd like to think I approached the film with an open mind. Because I'm descended from European Jews, I'm pretty sure I approached it with an open heart- there's nothing I'd rather see than a great film about the Holocaust.
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| Steven Spielberg with Liam Neeson on location in Poland. |
But when I finally got around to seeing Schindler's List this weekend, I wasn't overwhelmed. Yes, I was impressed with Spielberg's technical achievement and I was certainly moved by the uplifting and life-affirming story he chose to tell. And the performances by Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley, Ralph Fiennes and the rest of the cast were remarkable. But ultimately, I walked out of the theater disappointed.
Schindler's List contained as many parts commercial entertainment as it did cinematic art, which helped make it a great Steven Spielberg movie, but not a great movie. Looking at what many of us consider to be the defining tragedy of the twentieth century, Spielberg managed to make a film that in many ways fits comfortably into an ouever that also includes E. T.
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| Liam Neeson as Oskar Schindler, who protected Jewish workers in Nazi-occupied Poland. |
Much of my disappointment has to do with the film's context. It's one of only two major Hollywood movies in recent years to deal directly with the Holocaust. For my money, the other one, Sophie's Choice, was a much more powerful film. It seems to me that the title character of Sophie's Choice, a woman forced to decide which of her two children will have to die at the hands of the Nazis (and who ultimately takes her own life because she cannot live with the fact that she made the choice), is a much more potent and fitting symbol for the Holocaust than the title character of Schindler's List, a man who risked his life and squandered his fortune to save 1,100 Jews who would otherwise have perished. (Interestingly, neither of these two symbols of the Holocaust are Jewish.) The thing is, I don't want to be uplifted by a story about the Holocaust. I want to horrified. Granted, there's plenty of horror in Schindler's List, but it's a question of balance. Is Spielberg giving us a spoonful of sugar with our medicine, or is it the other way around?
Indeed, there were several moments in Schindler's List that were so undeniably sentimental that they made me cringe. Schindler's transformation from opportunist to humanitarian comes when he watches the destruction of a Jewish ghetto from the remove of a distant hilltop. He's transformed, however, not by the mass cruelty he witnesses, but by the ordeal of one little girl (wearing a red coat in an almost entirely black and white film) who wanders through the chaos to her doom. Children, of course, have always been central to Spielberg's vision (e.g. E.T. and Hook), but here his strategy seems painfully manipulative. Even more manipulative is Schindler's final scene, in which he chastizes himself for not having done more to save the Jews. Coming after we have learned that Schindler has lost his entire fortune to his efforts, this breakdown rings utterly false.
I was also bothered by Spielberg's depiction of Amon Goeth, the concentration camp commandant. He's the only Nazi we get to know in the film, and, thanks to Ralph Fiennes's terrifying performance, he comes across as a psychopath (and as a convenient stand-in for Hitler). The implication is that the Nazi horror was perpetuated by people like Goeth, and was not the responsibility of the German people or the result of a national xenophobia that clearly still exists today. If those who do not remember history are doomed to repeat it, this type of portrayal is particularly dangerous. After all, a whole generation will probably grow up learning about the Holocaust from Schindler's List, (especially if it wins the Best Picture Oscar, which it is clearly poised to do), and the lessons the film teaches, it seems to me, are not nearly strong enough.
Or is this merely my own bias? As
I wrote at the beginning of this piece, the way we view a given
film often tells us more about ourselves than it does about the
film in question. Perhaps the film's ultimate optimism about humanity
simply doesn't jibe with my more pessimistic views. At any rate,
it's unquestionably a good thing that Spielberg made it. Better
that a generation should grow up learning about the Holocaust from
this film than not at all. Furthermore, the film's commercial and
critical success may well open the door for other filmmakers to
examine the horrors of the Holocaust. Like his Schindler, Spielberg
may not have done all he could to save the world (though, judging
by the tone of his interviews, he doesn't seem to realize it), but
he has at least made a noble effort, which is far more than most
moviemakers can claim. MM
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This story was published in the February 1994 MovieMaker Magazine. The headline was:
Making History Hollywood Style / Steven Spielberg remakes Schindler in his own image.
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