On Screen
BROMWICH, DAVID
On Screen SCHINDLER'S SECRET REVOLT BY DAVID BROMWICH IN CRACOW, near the start of the Second World War, two men are talking. One is a Jewish businessman, the other a wealthy German. Why, asks...
...But showmen are rarely as simple as they look...
...Liam Neeson acts as if he had studied that photograph, and as if he evolved from it a face, a voice, a way of moving native to one person, a life of thoughts partly spoken and thoughts withheld...
...He was a technician chiefly of one emotion: fear...
...a study of the contrast between Schindler and the work camp commandant, Amon Goeth, who controls the destiny of all the inmates, including Schindler's workers...
...The man who desired, for just a moment, the company of the glamorous officers in the club, was doubtless as real as the man who staked high odds in a card game with a military bureaucrat to rescue a worker from the death camp...
...With Schindler's List, however, he found a story of great magnitude that had the added virtue of being true...
...and it happens as unremark-ably as two persons laughing at a joke for different reasons...
...It is not that any man could have become Amon Goeth...
...It is no use fancying that Schindler was a saint...
...They are two halves of the moral world touching in one place...
...In Schindler's company, Goeth has a boyish smile, the other side of the snarl the prisoners know so well...
...He sends over champagne with his compliments, then joins them as they are joined by a band of officers, and contrives to have his picture taken with the men of power...
...Both Fiennes as Goeth and Liam Nee-son as Schindler move and talk and appear to think like Germans, each with a different blend of the national traits...
...He has the natural dignity unfairly given to the man born bigger than his neighbors...
...A touch of palpable melodrama at the end of the film, where he is made to fall to his knees reproaching himself, wishing he could have saved even one more Jewish life, drops the story down a whole level because it is an irrelevant application for sainthood...
...He concludes, in an encomium to himself, "This is history...
...One reflects that an order of so much planned violence is at once a cause and a consequence of these struts of casual violence...
...His gruff-ness and his fluency lead unexpectedly back to each other...
...Schindler, if you like, was an odd confluence of moods and events, but his name stands for a blessing to many thousands...
...These vices have not mysteriously vanished, changed their valence, or been sublimated in Schindler's List...
...It comes with saying, I pardon you...
...Another choice is reported to have been made in response to a challenge by Fred Schepisi (director of The Russia House), who said "Let me direct the film...
...Who would pretend to explain him...
...On the patio of his house, he converses amiably with Schindler, whom he would like to fathom (his interest in getting to the bottom of things is much greater than Schindler's...
...There is a class of killers that only starts to know itself in time of war...
...A residue from his truckling earlier practice is the music here by John Williams, a Tiomkin-like, confusing tide of unrealized melody that churns for three hours without respect for the audience's right to sit and think...
...People who laugh at wretches in anecdote are apt to share the fun when the wretches of actual life are set upon...
...Goeth rather likes that idea...
...We are interested in his story because his goodness has the miraculous quality of an accident...
...I do not see how any treatment of the subject can avoid a betrayal...
...He keeps a Jewish woman as his servant?once almost making love to her, before he beats her as he has beaten her before...
...His plots have been pretexts: plot-lines for stringing together squibs, effects, visual or auditory gags and shocks...
...Coldness to the sources of such laughter may be one token of a character still somehow accessibly generous...
...he has a large relish for the smaller vices...
...A big truck hunts a little car up and down a mountain road...
...It is rather that Goeth, in an ordinary time, would have passed for an ordinary man...
...In the car is a person too primitive to be supposed a character, and the affective interest is held to zero...
...The camp is a sort of shantytown built by temporary survivors to house themselves, a labyrinth with one mouth and no exit...
...Look around, says the German...
...Spielberg, from the first, exhibited a grown-up pride in the sheer craft virtue of a performance every whit as good as the promise of the materials...
...His house overlooking the camp he calls his "villa," and the camera shot from there, to which the film returns unsettlingly, bears the emphasis of a trap shutting again and again...
...You can see what the skill is made of, what it is and is not good for, in his 1971 TV movie Duel, an important early success...
...Ralph Fiennes plays this dark and commonplace character with a brave delicacy, at an edge of things where a wrong step would lift him to an unmeant poignance, or plunge him into mere monstrosity...
...Goeth commemorates the destruction of the ghetto and the innovation of the slave dwellings in a brief sententious speech about the power to unmake the past...
...They are traceable elements in the occasional weakness of this film, too...
...He flirts with himself in the mirror, tenderly repeating "I pardon you...
...The shadows of average corruption pass over Schindler at many points...
...He is an irritable, pleasure-loving man, and his talks with Schindler (another hedonist) are a piece of experience one might live long without ever getting to see...
...They displayed a command of one new trick: how to shift the weight of the fear with a final climactic rush of relief...
...Neeson, on the other hand, commands any scene he is in with a curious largeness of gesture, an assurance that stops just short of arrogance...
...You do good work but you can never sell your wares...
...And the result is no less presumptuous than a wide-angle shot, with its supposed illicitness of detachment...
...Power," says Schindler, "does not come with saying I punish you...
...He belongs, in fact, to a type that fascinated a great chronicler of those years, Ber-tolt Brecht...
...Why, asks the Jew, should we take you on as a partner...
...He embraces them on both sides, in the manner, strong and somewhat proprietary, that a large man can handle with no loss of warmth...
...Everything else is close up or medium, and often a hand-held camera shoves the viewer into the tumult of wrecked lives...
...The real Oskar Schindler could not have done what he did had he not been an attractive, a confident, and a very wealthy man...
...When he hoses the cattle cars of a train to keep the prisoners alive inside, the lolling officers mock him savagely...
...From his perch, after a restless night, Goeth is free to aim his high-powered rifle and pick off one prisoner after another...
...Not only is there no crane shot, there is hardly a wide-angle shot of any kind...
...That is not our first glimpse of Oskar Schindler, the hero of Steven Spielberg's new film...
...You won't have the courage to do it without a crane shot...
...What do I offer...
...While he gave his protection, the Holocaust was grinding on, and Spielberg has taken this as part of his subject...
...Yet the impression of a constant and stifling intimacy itself grows quickly conventional...
...He gained weight for the part?rightly seeing, not in evil itself, but in this example of it a hidden motive of self-indulgence...
...Losing any of his workers would be a terrible setback to the war effort, he says...
...They are certainly right, and right about more than this film...
...A calculable effect of giving up the classical technique is that the film will be easily translatable to TV, where viewers are used to the dizzying crush and press of action 10 or 20 feet away...
...Yet the alternative is the omission of any story whatever, as in Paul Celan's "Ice, Eden" or Geoffrey Hill's "September Song...
...Commit yourself to a story and you are bound to lean on conventions, each of which carries a history of uses and stock responses...
...He draws out an immense scene, with the widest possible resonance of terror, to show the gutting and burning of the ghetto, as if to declare: "Here are the violences, from which no shelter was permanent...
...They talk about life, and about power...
...but the fear is genuine, it stays and spreads...
...Schindler, pausing, joins the vulgar laugh, and keeps on running the hose...
...The single exception is a panoramic view of the Cracow ghetto being torn apart by the Nazis, seen from the perspective of Schindler and his mistress on a hill above the town...
...Maybe the impression comes from his having to bend a little to hold them all in the picture...
...In the opening scene, he is dining alone at a fancy club and spots a Wehrmacht officer with a woman at a table nearby...
...And yet, Schindler does craftily share the humor of the wicked...
...Jokes, bad jokes, ironic jokes by victims and the cruel jokes of executioners, cruel to the point of opacity—all are much in evidence throughout the film...
...He commissioned and kept a good script by Steven Zaillian, and he gave the big parts to real actors with complicated faces...
...The boy walks away bewildered, a ponderous silence hangs over the camp, then we hear a shot and the boy is dead...
...Spielberg in his previous movies was a relentless showman in total command of a metier I would gladly see abolished...
...Oskar Schindler is a master in secret revolt...
...His later and more expensive films have been no less pro-grammatically morbid...
...A 1946 photograph of him with some of "Schindler's Jews" has already acquired a separate fame...
...Some who have seen the film, and some who never will, say the depiction of the slaughter is a betrayal since it can only serve to reduce the experience to a manageable size...
...Spielberg is obedient to the admonition...
...He utterly lacked the moral focus and the premeditation of the saint...
...You supply the product, I supply—Presentation...
...These choices troubled me while I was watching Schindler's List...
...Often, in his unaccountable partnership, he will risk his life to save "Schindler's Jews," giving as a reason that it is good business to keep your workers alive...
...But at the heart of the film is a story its makers had the patience not to tamper with...
...The character, for Brecht, was always a servant in secret revolt against his masters...
...In Fiennes you have the hitches, the evasions, the proffered conformities of emphasis, with an uneasy margin for explosive rage...
...He tries it out on the Jewish boy who washed his bathtub with soap instead of lye: "I pardon you...
...At the last word, he frames in his hands an unseen object of indescribable potency...
...They may busy themselves perfecting machines to squeeze tears out of children, but they are not themselves children...
...that is why it is fair to resent them...
Vol. 77 • February 1994 • No. 2
