#6 Schindler’s List:

I know more about World War II than you do. I say this with complete confidence, barring the occasional scholar. But I only make this note to make clear that nothing presented in this movie is new to me. I am able to write casually about such a terrible occurrence simply through studying it for 15 years. That out of the way, this is a great re-telling of the horror through the lens of a simple German business man. Early in the film, there’s a character-defining moment between Oskar Schindler and his wife where he reveals his greatest desire is to be remembered. Suffices to say, he succeeded. This movie is about a man who saw the opportunity of a lifetime in the Nazi desocialization of Jews in Poland and turned it into one of the most heroic and uplifting stories of the Holocaust. He started out nearly penniless, made the right connections, made the right deals and made a fortune selling pots and pans to the German army using Jewish forced labor. As time went on, the Nazi treatment of the Jews began to take a toll on Schindler and he changed his agenda. He spent all of the fortune he had made saving his workers from extermination. In the end, he was broke again. It’s a special sort of person who can do all that in the span of 6 years. And it’s a special actor to convincingly play a man of such depth. Liam Neeson does just that. He transforms as the movie progresses. At the beginning, the atrocities are just background to the opportunity at hand. Schindler only sees dollar signs. The movie itself doesn’t linger too long on the deaths of the innocent. But the tone and the character and the man all changed when the relatively comfortable ghetto changes into the cold and stark work camp. The German brutality is increased several fold during the “liquidation” and the internment. In this, I find my only criticism: Goth’s sociopathic tendencies were a little much for me to believe. There’s no human in the character Ray Fiennes portrays. Just a brutal, murdering animal. I felt that was too easy a juxtaposition to make. That being said, I am fully aware that most of the depictions of brutality are historical. But by the end, even I was desensitized to the violence. Humans are adaptive by nature. And the survivors of the camps know this better than anyone else possibly could. The actors did well to show this facet of humanity and so to did the direction.

Now one thing I have to give credit to; it is tough to insert laughs into this movie without blaspheming, but Speilberg managed to do it at least three times. Once is quite literally the definition of “gallows humor.” Hats off to you sir. As so many people of my generation are only vaguely aware of the specifics of the Holocaust, I recommend that anyone under the age of 30 watch this movie.