European Stars and Stripes (Newspaper) - January 16, 1994, Darmstadt, Hesse                                S fill p make sure to put Schindler s on your viewing list by Mike littwin the Baltimore Sun i went to see Schindler s list the other Day expecting the worst-1 was not disappointed. It was the toughest three hours i be Ever spent in a  it s your turn. Movie critics like to throw around that must see tag As if it were so much Popcorn. But Schindler s Listis definitely a must see movie. No it s the must see movie. Schindler s list in t just a movie. It s the movie equivalent of going 15 rounds with Mike Tyson. Everyone leaves battered and bruised. And in tears / ,. I want the same for you. Because it s important. Because what Steven Spielberg has done is to pro Duce Art and in the finest sense of the word. He took a subject that is virtually uni liable the destruction of 6 million jews and gave it Light. There Are those who believe any depiction of the holocaust necessarily trivializes it. How can you pos Sibly do Justice to the 6 million How do you explore Man s darkest behaviour in the same medium that routinely represents evil As a Chain saw massacre and expect it to enlighten but 1 think we should turn the question around. How else other than through Art can we possibly understand or even face what can t be fathomed see the movie. You probably know by now something of Oskar Schindler s Story which Spielberg adapted from Thomas Keneally s nonfiction Hovel Schindler was a nazi a Womanizer and a War profiteer who used jewish slave labor to make his Fortune. And in the end he risked it All to save jews he barely knew in the face of a culture that said jews were less than human. Why Schindler Why not others Spielberg does t try to explain Schindler s con version any More than the evil that surrounds him. In fact the wonder of the movie is that Spielberg the master of cinematic tricks and dinosaurs refused to give in to cheap tricks or easy explanations. He gave the viewer the full enormity of the holocaust. It is the most violent movie imaginable and yet at the same time its violence is the least gratuitous. Many people won t want to see Schindler s list because they go out at night to have fun to escape the Day s Dru Geries and worse. That s a reasonable expectation. We see enough truth every night on the news Don t we but let s compare truths. Let s take the truth of the dead american Soldier dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. It was a real picture of a real. Person and a real tragedy. And we reacted in the Only Way available to us with real anger. The picture though lacked subtext. It was t a Story. It did t Tell us anything other than what we could see. And in fact it told us much less. Art is different. Art a movie painting poem is meant to reveal something. 1 Learned this truth As a kid when first read the crapes of Wrath another Story of Man s inhumanity. To Man. I knew Little about the depression and Noth ing about okies but the Book left me profoundly moved and even changed. It s fair to say i be not seen the world in quite the same Way since. Somebody once wrote that the holocaust could never be a metaphor for anything else. I think that s True. The immensity of the horror choir jul stand alone. Schindler s list does t try to stand for any thing. What the movie does is ask you As Art should to think the unthinkable and feel the unimaginable. Cafes says it has yet to Sot a data Tor the showing of Schindler s list on its circuit Universal Liam Nelson Center plays Oskar Schindler among jews headed for Auschwitz in Schindler s list. The Downside of this hit too shallow and Long by Frank Rich the new York times negative words about Schindler s list Steven Spielberg s holocaust movie Are verboten in polite company. Everyone from president Clinton to the nation movie critics has called it a masterpiece with some enthusiasts pointedly reassuring readers that at 3 hours 16 minutes the film is not a moment too Long. Schindler s list is the culture s new Messiah the antidote to the terrifying 1993 Roper organization poll in which 22 percent of the american Public expressed doubt that the nazi extermination of the jews actually happened. So Why i asked myself did this particular Ameri can jew find Schindler s list More often numbing than moving and Why am i sceptical that holocaust ignoramuses will even see it let alone be swayed by it ,. " the problem is not that Spielberg a giant Talent has made an inept insincere or vulgar film. Schind Ler s list is not the color yellow. Its Only fabulously cheesy scene is a finale in which the righteous Ger Man War profiteer Oskar Schindler played by Liam Neeson gives a sentimental speech to the jewish factory workers he saved and they look up at him awestruck As if he were the levitating Mother ship in close encounters of the third kind. Other sequences Are stunning especially the horrific passages of hand held pseudo documentary camera work that depict the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto and the Gas Chambers at Auschwitz. But if such atrocities Are made exceptionally vivid by the director s cinematic brilliance their emotional Power is muted by the anonymity of the film s jews. Spielberg has found hundreds of evocative faces to populate his simulated holocaust but their souls Are skin deep. The Only major jewish character in the script Schindler s accountant Ben Kingsley is a Type King of the jewish wimps As one of the movie s few Tough critics Ilene Rosenzweig of the jewish newspaper the Forward has put it. The others who have the generic feel of Compo Sites Are As forgettable As the chorus in a touring company of fiddler on the roof or for that matter the human Dino fodder of Jurassic Park. They blur into abstraction becoming another de personalized statistic of mass death. Since Schindler is also presented As a psychological Blank no wonder the unhinged nazi commandant Ralph Fiennes runs away with the movie. I cried at Spielberg s graphic depiction of Geno cide anyway. Weaker holocaust dramatizations than this one have pushed my buttons. Like anyone who is jewish knows jews or simply knows history i can automatically flesh out the human ciphers in Schindler s list with characters and associations of Myown. This May be the Case for much of the Large and i imagine heavily jewish audiences who have made the movie a hit so far in major american cities where remedial education about the holocaust is less needed than any place this Side of Israel. But what happens when Schindler s list is re leased in the great american malls not to mention other countries where jews Are sparse will teen agers Check it out will audiences who have never heard of Shoah or Europa Europa they might do so More readily if Spielberg s movie were not Sef indulgently Over Long by a Good hour. This same syndrome afflicted Spike Lee s Malcolm a which ended up preaching mainly to the converted the film might also More effectively draw indifferent audiences into its historical Nightmare if the jews on screen were As individual and intimately dramatized As Anne Frank or even meryl Streep s Sophie. What is most worrisome about the wild Over Praise of Schindler s list is the complacency it invites. The hype is already taking on a life of its own wrapping the movie and the holocaust in a neat uplifting hol Lywood ending that allows everyone to sleep easier. As this comforting Litany has it some 1,300 jews on Schindler s list did survive after All the nazi sadist did get his just deserts Schindler s heroic exam ple May inspire others to resist future nazis a hit movie will  the holocaust in the world s memory. And there s a Happy ending for Spielberg too having come of age As a jew he May get a prize greater than a Fountain pen the Oscar he has so Long and unjustly been denied. Schinder s list is Good news for everyone it seems except its shadowy and often nameless extras the 6 million dead. I Page 20 sunday january 16, 1994