My Favorite Movies: #1—Schindler's List

1. Schindler’s List (1993) 

Genre: Historical Drama 

Director: Steven Spielberg 

Writer: Steven Zaillian (screenplay), Thomas Keneally (novel) 

Stars: Liam Neeson, Ralph Fiennes, Ben Kingsley, Embeth Davitz 

Awards: 7 Oscars—Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, Art Direction, Editing, Music 

Metacritic score: 93 

IMDB Ranking: #6

The greatest movie ever made, and hence the movie at the top of my list, is Steven Spielberg's epic masterpiece, Schindler's List. If I was just going on "favorite," my #2 pick, Inception, would be in the top spot simply because it is more "entertaining" in a conventional way. But film is often art as well as entertainment, and in the case of Schindler's List, although the entertainment value is tempered by the vast seriousness of the subject, it is a work of profound artistry, deeply moving, historically important, and most of all, sublimely beautiful.

The movie is beautiful because it's honest. Spielberg, master of dramatic camera angles, lets the story speak for itself. Not that it's not brilliantly photographed—the black-and-white cinematography won Janusz Kaminsky a well-deserved Oscar—it's that Spielberg lets the story speak for itself, often opting for hand-held cameras in a documentary style rather than his more familiar Hollywood techniques. The acting is impeccable throughout, and the story is so powerful, it will stay for you forever.

If for some inexplicable reason you don't yet know the story, Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson) is an opportunistic German businessman (that's being generous—he's a classy grifter) who comes to Nazi-occupied Krakow, Poland, and takes over an enamelware factory using cash from recently displaced Jewish investors. He draws on the expertise of accountant Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley) to run the company, which operates using a Jewish labor force because they're more profitable.

The business is an enormous success, and Schindler uses his fortune to bribe Nazi officials and bed beautiful women, and he revels in his success. But the Nazis are not interested in profit; they are working toward their "final solution" for the Jews in Europe. Schindler's work force is relocated to the Plaszow labor camp, run by psychopathic commandant Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes, ten times more terrifying than Voldemort because he's playing a real monster). 

Goeth informs Schindler that all the Jews are being moved to Auschwitz concentration camp. Schindler uses his fortune to purchase more than 1,100 Jewish lives from Goeth and death at the hands of the Nazis. In one of the most emotionally devastating scenes of the movie, Stern asks Schindler how he accomplished this: "What did Goeth say about this, you just told him how many people you needed, and..." Stern's face breaks with realization: "You're not buying them? You're buying them? You're paying him?"

The Bible talks about the concept of redemption, which in those times, meant buying someone out of slavery. Oskar Schindler was a modern-day redeemer, one who had no other significant success in his life, but who was placed in the right place at the right time to exploit a group of people for his own profit, money that he would eventually use to buy their lives and their freedom. Stern tells him, "The list is an absolute good. The list is life. All around its margins lies the gulf."

I love this movie more than I can adequately express, but if you've never seen it, there are some harrowing scenes that will haunt you afterward. It is a movie of contrasts, of death and life, of terror and of hope. I revel in Schindler's first scene, where he ingratiates himself to the Nazi military brass in Krakow, collecting numerous photographs of them together. It's exciting to watch how he uses the Polish black market to collect luxuries with which to grease the wheels of his success.

It's also horrifying to watch the Nazis liquidate the Krakow ghetto. Spielberg didn't shy away from the brutality of that event. You see men, women, and children shot dead at point-blank range. You see the utter lack of humanity is the guise of the Nazi soldiers. Later, Schindler's woman workers are mistakenly routed to Auschwitz. The camera follows them into a dark chamber, where they are stripped naked and locked in. The lights go out and they all scream, shaking and huddling together. They don't know if they are about to die. Then, water streams out from overhead. It's a shower, not a gas chamber, and their cries of terror melt into tears of relief and joy.

This is not an easy movie to watch. It's more than three hours long, and it's mostly in black-and-white, which is a turn-off for many modern viewers (which it shouldn't be—the photography and lighting is simply genius). But it's perhaps the most important movie ever made. Spielberg used the success and notoriety of this movie to start the USC Shoah Foundation, a nonprofit organization established to record testimonies in video format of survivors and other witnesses of the holocaust.

But in the end, this is a movie about World War II and the Holocaust that ends with a message of hope. In a war where so many people died, in a situation where a war profiteer could have walked away with the fortune he made, Oskar Schindler saved more than 1,100 lives, the descendants of whom today number more than 6,000. In contrast, less than 4,000 Jews remain in Poland today. 

When you watch it, and I think every person has a moral responsibility to watch it at least once, you will cry at several points, but at no point do I avoid a really ugly red-faced snotty cry than at the very end, when the actors from the film walk side-by-side with their real-life "Schindler's Jews" counterpart to place a stone on the grave of Oskar Schindler. Coupled with John Williams' theme played on violin by Izhak Perlman, even the hardest of hearts could not fail to be moved.

 

I first saw this movie in St. Louis at a special sneak preview. I was invited to be part of a focus group audience. We were given questionnaires to fill out afterward, with a number of categories asking us to rank the film from 1 to 10. I gave it tens in every category. I knew from that moment that it would win most of the Oscars that year, and it did, seven in all, including Spielberg's first (and long overdue) Best Director award. Clearly from my list, I love Spielberg's work, and I'm always excited to see what he'll do next, but he will never surpass this achievement. I think he would agree with me on that.