Spielberg and beer

Fri Mar 12 2004

schindlers_listWe are presently enjoying a bottle of Goose Island India Pale Ale, which is hoppy but quite good. We have just watched Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures on Bravo, which was probably not the best way to experience that lovely film for the first time, but has the added virtue of being free.

It is interesting to note, or perhaps wonder at, the ways that the small, character-driven sensibility meshes with PJ's reputation as the "Kiwi King of Splatter", and if Jackson's sensitivity to a story about two mad girls and their interior lives is by way of a chance to have giant clay people with swords kill people, or for his antiheroines to be menaced by Orson Welles in The Third Man.

We have also watched Schindler's List on DVD. Recent conversations have mentioned that Shoah is the superior Holocaust film. Of this I am certain: Shoah is a documentary, and the thing that takes one right out of Schindler's-as-Holocaust is its moments of Spielbergian sentimentality. The last scene, where Schindler's reaction to the gratitude of "his" Jews is to freak out over how many more he could have saved by selling his car or his Nazi pin, is a total acting moment for Neeson, and only underscores that he is an actor given pithy lines by screenwriter Steven Zaillian, that this is a drama and that the lengthy sequence of the Schindler Jews returning (along with the members of the cast who played them) perhaps tries for a resonance and authority that the movie hasn't really earned.

It's frustrating that some viewers, because of the subject matter, find it unseemly to consider Schindler's List as a movie -- it's much more polite to consider it an artifact of Holocaust memorial that is beyond reproach or discussion. I am not certain that it is an "important" film -- it is perhaps the most ignored movie in history, in the sense that we think of it as unimpeachable. I am also not certain that it's Spielberg's best film, although it probably ties for first place with A.I..

What's most surprising to me is that I didn't remember the film's depiction of its Nazi villains to be so even-handed and human. Apart from Goeth (Ralph Fiennes), who is a likable but unforgivable sadist, generally the Nazis are bureaucrats and plutocrats who are more worried about their own position and workload than in human lives. They are depicted as amoral, which is even more chilling for the notion that (e.g.) Ben Kingsley could be erased from the face of the earth because he doesn't have his work card in his pocket.

I'm sure I'm not the only one to notice, but it's interesting that in Spielberg's movies, the antagonist is rarely evil in the Darth Vader sense, but always amoral and ruthless. This applies both to the monsters, like Jaws or the T-Rex in Jurassic Park, and to humans like Belloq (in Raiders) and the Max von Sydow character in Minority Report. A surprising lot of Spielberg movies are about how self-serving, powerful men can use/abuse even more powerful systems to destroy lives. In his best films, the characters never live happily ever after, even though the director has a gift for finding endings that leave you not questioning the existence of God (much). In fact, Spielberg's most unsatisfying endings -- such as in Saving Private Ryan or Minority Report -- are the ones where a sentimental coda is tacked onto a bleak, but otherwise perfect, ending.

What I'm trying to get at: when you consider Schindler's List as a movie and not as a trope of the Holocaust itself, it becomes noticeable that all Spielberg films tell this same story; what makes Schindler's exceptional is that while it is about a noble act, it is fully aware of the insanity that necessitated it.