Wow…. Just Wow. That’s the first impression that I got from Schindler’s List. I saw Schindler’s List in the theater when it first came out, and I remember being so emotionally browbeaten that I never had the desire to put myself through that again. Even then, I recognized that it was not only a great film, but an important one as well, but you can’t watch Schindler’s List without recognizing the fact that these things really happened to people whose only crime was being Jewish. This is the type of film that stirs up an emotional storm inside the viewer, and many of those emotions are negative right up until the very end. However, what I realized in watching it again last night for the first time in more than 20 years is that the overriding emotion is hope.

Let’s start off stating that Schindler’s List is about humanity. Humanity is the spine of this story. It’s about how we treat each other as human beings, how we value (or don’t value) other’s lives and what we do to preserve our humanity. It points out that the Nazis didn’t consider Jews to be full human beings, and that was how they were able to morally justify attempting to exterminate them.

The personification of this theme resides in the character of Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson). When we first meet him, he is a charming scam artist, an opportunist, a war profiteer, and an adulterous womanizer. He understands that the war will be a long one and he sees in it the opportunity to make a lot of money. Once the Jews of Krakow have been sent to the ghetto, he further understands that he can make even more money by exploiting them for slave labor. One of the things that makes Schindler’s personal journey so effective is the fact that it starts out so organically. He starts out the film as a charming scoundrel and through the devices of the story, he slowly develops into a caring individual who is able to use his powers of persuasion to help people other than himself.

He has no money of his own at the start of the story, so he enlists the aid of Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley), a former accountant at a local factory to recruit local Jewish businessmen so that he can use their money to start his operation of making pots and pans. He will pay them with goods, since they aren’t allowed to have money in the ghetto. Stern is then able to forge papers to make it look as though some people from the ghetto are deemed as “essential workers” to prevent them from being moved to concentration camps.

Meanwhile Schindler is playing both sides of the deck. He treats the workers well, although at first doesn’t really want to accept their thanks or even acknowledge the good he’s doing. He sees himself as a business man and hiring the Jews is good for his business. He also is in bed with the Nazis because he knows where his bread is buttered and he can’t continue to use them as workers unless the Nazis either have faith in him, or he continues to bribe them.

After witnessing the clearing of the ghetto and the absolute brutality endured by these people that he’s started to care for, does he fully understand the scope of their persecution. He isn’t yet ready to look at the Nazi’s as the bad guys, but honestly believes that the chaos of war is making basically good people do bad things. But shortly thereafter he starts to hear stories of the camp commandant Amon Goeth (Ralph Feinnes), and the sadistic satisfaction he seems to get from killing, sometimes indiscriminately, sometimes with a terrifying purpose.

I’m not going to go too much further into the plot, other than to give examples of how the characters of Schindler and Goeth demonstrate the different directions in how people value humanity. As the film moves on and Goeth continues to demonstrate that he values the lives of Jews on the same level as the life of an insect, Schindler sees them as people who are suffering. And as the story continues on even further, we see the great variance in the levels of humanity within Schindler and Goeth. The most striking example is a scene where a train filled with Jews is waiting by the platform. It’s a hot day and the people inside the train are suffering greatly from the heat. Goeth and his minions ignore their suffering, but Schindler shows up and convinces Goeth to let him spray the train cars with a firehose as a means of cooling them off. At first, Goeth and his company laugh at the effort that Schindler shows in having a soldier spray the cars, and the determination that Schindler shows in making sure that all of the cars get cooled off. He even points out how cruel Schindler is being by even giving them hope. But then Goeth starts to understand what Schindler is really doing. He’s trying to give these people some small semblance of mercy and compassion that Goeth would never even consider they deserved. And he’s not happy about it.

There are two great scenes that leads to a sequences demonstrating Goeth’s lack of humanity is the scene where Schindler tries to tell Goeth what real power is. Killing a person for doing wrong is not power, he says. It’s justice. He then tells Goeth that true power resides in having the ability and the right to kill someone, but not doing it. He then tells him a story of an emperor who pardoned a citizen he by right could have had killed, and that was a greater demonstration of his power than the killing would have been. Goeth then tries in the ensuing scenes to live by this philosophy. People who in earlier scenes would have been shot for the smallest of transgressions are pardoned. But the frustration builds in him until he returns to his villa and his house boy hasn’t been able to remove the stains from his bathtub and lies about how hard he was trying. He tells the boy to leave, but as he sits there thinking about it, his frustration grows until he shoots the boy. Goeth is incapable of showing any humanity towards these people.

The other scene occurs between Schindler and Helen, Goeth’s house maid. She confesses to Schindler that Goeth beat her terribly her first day there. When she asked him why she was beating her, he responded that he was beating her because he asked her why. Since then, she’s been afraid that he will one day just decide to shoot her. Schindler tells him not to worry about that because he cares for her too much. The others that he killed meant nothing to him, so killing them meant nothing to him. Then a little later on, Goeth confesses to Helen that he’s attracted to her, but she only stands there, petrified. Goeth then talks to her and works out the reasoning to himself why he can’t sleep with her, even saying that Jews “aren’t human in the strictest sense of the word”. He then savagely beats her, having talked himself into the belief that she was trying to tempt him.

Ultimately what Schindler’s List is saying about humanity is that you get what you give. Oskar Schindler showed humanity towards his fellow man and his growth as a character went from uncaring profiteer to empathetic hero who, with the help of Stern, comes up with a list of more than 1100 people that he keeps out of Auschwitz, and most assuredly saved their lives. Meanwhile, Goeth shows no humanity towards those who need it most, and he becomes a monster.

Another thing that separates Schindler’s List from other is that it takes the time to dramatically show how the Nazis systematically attempted to not just marginalize and discriminate against Jews, but actually attempted to exterminate them. They started out by forcing all Jews to register. Then they didn’t allow them to own businesses. Then they rounded them all up and forced them to live in the ghetto. Finally, they cleared the ghetto and sent them all to labor camps before they would ultimately be sent to concentration camps. It was a sinister process that can only be described as evil, and it really happened. Director Steven Spielberg, who had come up short in his four previous nominations (Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T., and The Color Purple) finally broke through by dramatically showing the meticulous and systematic measures that the Nazis took in this planned genocide that turned into the Holocaust.

I also should mention that there are a surprising number of laughs in this film. Don’t get me wrong, this film is as serious as they get and is an important and serious film. But one thing that Spielberg is very good at is manipulating emotions. He did the same thing in The Color Purple, which is also a very serious film. He knew that he’d lose his audience if there was not at least a small range in the emotional meter of the film. In Schindler’s List, while it clearly isn’t a comedy, Spielberg new that he was going to need to lighten the mood at least occasionally to keep the audience engaged, and again to show that there was some humanity here. A lot of the laugh inducing moments come from Schindler himself, and that serves the dual purpose of making him likable as a character as well. It’s just one more example of how this is a very well-crafted film.

Speaking of Spielberg, he has become somewhat of a polarizing director. I look at Schindler’s List as arguably his best film (although Jaws is right there as well), and this film is probably the most un-Spielberg like film that he’s ever made. He as a well-deserved reputation of being overly sentimental in his work, and even though he should be considered to be one of the great directors in the history of cinema, I don’t get the sense that he gets the respect of some of his contemporaries, like Martin Scorsese or Stanley Kubrick or any other number of directors. Personally, I feel like when Spielberg is on, there are few directors that do it better. But when he is off (A.I., Minority Report, War of the Worlds) his films can be very disappointing. In fact, I was watching Hook with my kids the other night, and that film is a great example of how sentimental he can be as a film maker and sometimes that amount of sentimentality can actually diminish the emotional investment that people make in a film. Schindler’s List does get a tad sentimental at the end, although I love the scene where Schindler laments the fact that he could have saved one more life had he just sold his gold Nazi Party pin. The fact that we’ve been taken on such a brutal journey where sentiment has been replaced by humanity, shows the breadth and the depth of his particular film.

Did the Academy get it right?

While this might have been one of the biggest no-brainers in Oscar history, it’s not like Schindler’s List was nominated against a bunch of films you’ve never heard of. While The Fugitive is a terrific film, I always felt that it was a bit of a head scratcher that it got nominated for Best Picture. I like that film a lot, but I don’t consider it to be of Best Picture quality. However In the Name of the Father is a very powerful film starring Daniel Day-Lewis (who would star in another Spielberg Best Picture nominee in Lincoln two decades later) about a father and son who are wrongfully sent to prison over an IRA bombing and try for years to clear their names. It’s a film you should see if you haven’t. The Piano was a moving picture about a woman in a loveless marriage who makes an arrangement to have her piano returned to her, but must give up her body in order to do so. It’s a film that examines how far we would go for the things and the people that we love. Finally, The Remains of the Day was another World War II-era film in which Anthony Hopkins was the head butler of an English manor who is tempted by the love of a new housekeeper. It’s a film about misplaced loyalty and unrequited love that is heartbreaking and moving. Any of the latter three films could have been worthy winners in nearly any other year, but the scope and importance and quality of Schindler’s List made it the clear choice for Best Picture in 1993.