In Schindler's List, children rush toward an ominous line of waiting trucks. In their exuberant innocence, the youngsters wave a farewell whose finality they cannot know as their parents stand helpless, paralyzed by the horror of what awaits their offspring. Like many scenes in Schindler's List, this parting becomes more than an indelible, wrenching moment of shared pain. It is rendered with a restraint and a prodigious filmmaking technique that transform an image into an act of scarcely bearable communion for the audience.
A labor of love drawn from events of unspeakable hate, Schindler's List is a masterwork in which Spielberg has met and surmounted the transcendent difficulties of making a viable Holocaust film. Moviegoers may be drawn to
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And in a character who makes a halting, almost cryptic transition from selfishness and venality to selflessness, Spielberg shifts the focus away from the usual victim and victimizer. We see things through the eyes of a flawed man who found himself in hell and made a Faustian pact with the Devil so that 1,100 Jews might be spared.
Schindler's List is filmed in black and white, but the triumph of Neeson's portrait and Steven Zaillian's screenplay is that Oskar Schindler remains gray and enigmatic. At the outset, Schindler seems to be just another greedy businessman, happily wining, dining and whoring with Nazi officers and bureaucrats to assure himself a profitable war. The movie gradually refines that view but retains its ambiguity - which is as it should be in a world that has lost its moral parameters and its hold on sanity.
Schindler contrives to have unpaid Jewish labor make cookware for the German army and plays the system and its manifold corruptions like a virtuoso musician. Throughout, Schindler is caught between the polarities of good and evil represented by camp commandant Amon Goeth and Itzhak Stern , a Jewish accountant who serves as Schindler's right-hand man and guides him in more ways than