Schindler's List

When's clicking, director Steven Spielberg is capable of making great movies. But when he misses the mark, he's off — way off. At his best, Spielberg strikes emotional chords within movie-goers that other directors can only dream about. At his worst, he's extremely manipulative and intensely adolescent.

Not that he needs to worry about these fluctuations affecting his affecting his finances. Despite a recent track record of mammoth bombs (Empire of the Sun, Always and Hook), Spielberg has always been able to rebound with hits that routinely rewrite the list of all-time box office champs. After the completely preposterous success of Jurassic Park, he could make a musical based on the Yel­low Pages without fearing for the robust­ness of his bankroll.

But Spielberg's hungry for things that money can't buy: critical recognition and artistic respect. He wants a gold-plated Oscar and a scrapbook full of rave reviews. Most of all, he wants to be taken seriously.

With Schindler's List, Spielberg finally gets his wish. The guy who used to be called the "Cincinnati Kid" is now the spokesperson for mature, significant filmmaking. The wunderkind who built movies as if they were theme parks is now confronting the Holocaust. And it works — Schindler's List is one of Spiel­berg's greatest films.

It's also one of his most difficult films to watch. Spielberg promised a direct confrontation with the death camps, and he wasn't kidding. Schindler's List relent­lessly unspools a detailed presentation of enough Nazi atrocities to fill a war-crime tribunal.

The movie's based on a true story, that of Oskar Schindler, a German entrepreneur who saved the lives of hundreds of Polish Jews by buying their freedom from Nazi death camps and giving them jobs in his factory. The film's script is adapted from author Thomas Keneally's book by the same name.

Schindler (played by Irish actor Liam Neeson) starts out as a lik­able, but incompetent, businessman who's followed the German Army into Poland because he smells an opportunity to make easy money. The Nazis are busy taking over factories and they're looking for loyal Teutonic types to run them, which is where Schindler comes in. Schindler also realizes that an equally lucrative business is to be had in the form of entertaining the Wehrmacht's officers with wild "presentations" (read: parties). So he convinces a Jewish man (Ben Kingsley) to do the boring book work at his new factory, while he han­dles the "presentations."

The deal's simple — and raw. While Schindler does the networking, Kingsley runs the real business and recruits other Jews from the Krakow ghetto to work in Schindler's factory. Unfortunately, at this point in the story, Schindler is less concerned with helping his employees than with exploiting them. The workers' wages are used to bribe Nazi officials, and in return for their lost wages, the employees are given pots and pans to barter with on the black market.

And so it goes, until the S.S. kicks into gear, destroying the ghetto and shipping the survivors off to a forced labor camp.

Slowly, it dawns on Schindler that the Nazis don't intend for anyone to get out alive. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, he becomes morally revolted by the very process be helped initiate. He begins to free prisoners by creating a list of (fictitious) factory jobs, then he uses his good standing with the Nazis (plus good old-fashioned bribes) to convince them to release prisoners to fill the jobs.

The story's simple structure barely suggests the emotional force that Spiel­berg invested in Schindler's List. Nor does it prepare viewers for the fact that Spielberg - quite unexpectedly - reinvents the art house film genre with this film, as he beats a complete (and wise) retreat from his Disneyland approach to movie­making. For Schindler's List, he borrows from such wildly divergent forms as film noir, cinema verite, Italian Neo-Realism and French New Wave. The movie's a virtual textbook of the past 50 years of international film movements. Even the liberation scene near the end of Schindler's List is designed to invoke Russian films of the 1950s.

Spielberg's touch isn't limited to visu­als, however. Schindler's List needs to be seen in a theater with a good sound sys­tem, because its soundtrack is a brilliant piece of audio construction. At times, important parts of the film take place in the speakers, rather than on the screen. Schindler's List is big, and powerful, and important. But to my mind, one of its most indelible moments is also one of its quietest: a slow pan across the mountainous heaps of clothing, eleglasses, and shoes that belonged to the dead. With this one camera shot, Spielberg captures the overwhelming horror of genocide.