Schindler's List: a squandered opportunity

Schindler's list is a film that has had greatness thrust upon it, but what else can you expect when the audience watches it with head bowed in respect and the mind's eye reverentially closed? They watch it with the sub-conscious awareness that what is unfolding before them is not another celluloid dream but the long delayed funeral march of the millions of innocent people who were brutally slaughtered during one of the most horrific pogroms in human history. They are cathartically conditioned to conclude, as they did with 'Gandhi', that the movie has plumbed the very depths of human evil.

Sad to say, then, "Schindler's List" remains an essentially superficial movie bound by formula conventions. It deals with the story of Schindler who, regardless of his personal foibles, pulled off an extraordinary act of courage while millions were systematically massacred by fellow Nazis. It is a colossal subject for any director to undertake and Steven Spielberg, while being faithful to the sad facts of history, takes the emotionally manipulative short-cut when it comes to dramatizing the action.

The characters remain one-dimensional and stereotyped as per dubious conventions established by rabble-rousing Hollywood war movies with no pretensions of historical fidelity. The Nazis in the movie represent real historical figures but they are played in the typical fashion of monstrous villains in fictional dramas. They are utterly uniformly vile, prompt in the execution of sadistic orders and untouched by the faintest trace of dignity or remorse at their actions. Throughout the movie not a sigh escapes any of the Nazis. The only moment when they are not trigger-happy comes right at the end of the move when they have lost the war and refuse to mow down Schindler's Jews. Their defeat is not pitiable but comic, as Schindler makes patronizing remarks, and provides the audience opportunity to smirk victoriously in the movie.

Schindler himself is a prototype of the rare good Nazi that Hollywood allows itself -- an outcast who wears the badge of the establishment but does not truly belong to it. His money and style ultimately symbolize not the opportunities that war provided to unscrupulous businessmen like him but the moral decrepitude of Nazi officers who threw principles to the wind at every chance of making a fast buck. Fittingly he is perched stop a hillock during the scene midway in the film when his countrymen run amok in the camp below and he recognizes that his salvation lies with the God's chosen people.

The Jews in the movie suffer from extreme nobility. The holocaust is an occasion for stoicism and dignified suffering -- a link in the chain that unites them with their persecuted ancestors. There is little dissension among them and almost no defiance. A hopeless bid to escape by a cherubic little boy that precipitates great carnage sums up the situation --angels violated by demons! A more obvious symbol is the anonymous death of a pretty child marked out in superimposed red, whose disturbed grave symphonizes the satanic malaise gripping the Nazis. God however does not entirely abandon his chosen people. Guns jam, almost miraculously, when a rabbi is taken out to be summarily shot -- the priest survives to preserve the brood's conscience. No doubt the Jews endured great misfortune but by garbing them in holiness, Spielberg ceases to be dispassionate and objective.

Spielberg 's greatest asset is his identification with the audience's needs and he delivers an emotional, heart-tugging statement garnished by black and white photography, somber music, leisurely pace, skilful design and other prerequisites of ‘admirable' cinema. However, he has lost the opportunity to explore the war and its impact on human behavior. He has just made clichés honorable.