Schindler's List: A

I discussed in my review of Magnolia the need for a filmmaker to make epics, and Steven Spielberg is one filmmaker who makes epics, several of them. His first, made in 1993, was called Schindler's List and it detailed not only the story of one corrupt buisnessman saving 1000's of Jews, but of one Nazi killing them (Ralph Fienes in a piercing, insane role), and of the Jews themselves, dying. This richly shot black-and-white 200 minute epic was the first of it's kind, documentary or not, to show us the true fear of authoratarianism gone mad. The rules were ever changing, the papers that saved you yesterday could today condemn you. The Nazis were like sick frat-boy bullies, acting out their worst dreams through murder.

Where Munich (Spielberg's latest epic) worked off of one of the smartest scripts of the last decade, Schindler's List works off of the strongest and most intense images I've ever seen in a movie (although the script for it is still a very good one). Consider this: for 10 minutes the Warsaw Ghetto is being raded and liquidated, every Jew must go, but some must die as well. There is no music playing in this mega-scene, the screams and gun shots provide us our symphony of pain and terror and ecstasy, or when truckloads of singing and laughing children are shipped away while mothers run screaming towards the trucks in panic.

What pieces all of the scenes together is a hopeful story in and of itself, Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson) is a man we all assume is rich and powerful (even though later we find out he had nothing before the war), and with a casual bribe he assumes the (drunken) control of a table full of Nazi commanders. He goes on to build a company out of nothing, secretly run by several Jewish investors (since they couldn't own anything at the time), and held together by Schindler's accountant Isak (Ben Kingsley). Eventually Schindler stores up enough goodwill, money, and his uncommon extraordinary cunning to re-route more than 1000 Jews from Auschwitz to his sub-camp in his home town.

This is a man who conned the Nazi's by pretending to steal money from them, when in fact he was stealing Jews. His trick best goes like this: every day the guard would ask the thief what he was stealing out of those wheelbarrows and everyday the guard would find nothing until one day he realized, the thief was stealing whellbarrows. This film does something no film has yet to date: it shows us all of the Holocaust, the hope, the madness, the triumph, and the terror, and how one saved life can save the world entire.