Steven Spielberg (87 page)

It is when Schindler unexpectedly begins seeing his Jewish workers as individuals that he begins to change his thinking about the war. The first such incident is that of the elderly one-armed machinist, Lowenstein (Henryk Bista), who interrupts Schindler at lunch to thank him for having classified him as “essential to the war effort”—a designation that has saved his life, which the Nazis regard as useless. “God bless you, sir,” Lowenstein earnestly tells him. “You are a good man.” Realizing that he is
not
such a good man, Schindler reacts with shame, losing his appetite and angrily demanding of Stern, “Don’t ever do that to me again!” Stern, who throughout the film acts as Schindler’s conscience, has arranged the meeting as one of his many careful and subtle appeals to the better angels of Schindler’s nature. As Spielberg has pointed out, Stern is the “unsung hero” of the story, a man who manipulates Schindler masterfully while keeping his own emotions under almost superhuman control. Ben Kingsley’s finely shaded performance, rich with understated compassion and the gallows humor of a born survivor, captures what Keneally called the “limitless calm” of a character who can never afford to utter a wrong word, because hundreds of people’s lives depend on him. The unspoken message Stern hopes to convey to Schindler is the same one Spielberg repeatedly gave to Kingsley when they discussed his character. The director said simply, “Be a
mensch.
”

The one-armed man’s intrusion into Schindler’s comfortable existence, soon followed by his shockingly brutal public execution, crystallizes the moral issues Schindler until then has been able to ignore. Some critics complained that Spielberg fails to make clear why Schindler undergoes his change of heart. Although the evidence on screen of Schindler’s growing empathy and compassion is abundantly clear to anyone who has eyes to see, this profound transformation is all the more powerful for not being spelled out in words. The climactic moment of Schindler witnessing the liquidation of the ghetto with silent horror achieves its emotional impact partly because he (and the audience) have been prepared for it by his earlier protection of Lowenstein and other victims of escalating Nazi cruelty, including the
symbolically unkillable Rabbi Levartov (Ezra Dagan), who miraculously survives Goeth’s repeated attempts to shoot him.

While Schindler’s goodness is hardly “incomprehensible,” there
is
a mystery in it that resists facile explanation. Spielberg credited screenwriter Steven Zaillian with making this the film’s thematic focus: “Steve had a very strong point of view. He approached it as the Rosebud theory—the mystery as to why Schindler did what he did…. Even having made the movie about his life, I still don’t know him very well. I ended my experience, I guess, a bit like [the newsreel reporter] in
Citizen
Kane,
where I was not able to go back to my editor with the story that he wanted. Every day it was frustrating.”

Honoring the memory of a rescuer stresses the importance of individual responsibility while giving the lie to the myth that Germans were powerless to resist the Nazi tyranny. “I hated the brutality, the sadism, and the insanity of Nazism,” was the straightforward explanation Schindler gave after the war for his heroic actions. “I just couldn’t stand by and see people destroyed. I did what I could, what I had to do, what my conscience told me I must do. That’s all there is to it. Really, nothing more.” But ultimately the question of why one person chooses good over evil must always remain, to some extent, a spiritual riddle. When Poldek Pfefferberg was asked in 1993 why he thought Schindler saved him, he replied,
“Who
cares!
I don’t give a hoot for the reasons he did it. He saved eleven hundred people.” Spielberg wisely resists allowing Liam Neeson’s Schindler to make any explicit declaration about his motives.

“The studio, of course, wanted me to spell everything out,” Spielberg said. “I got into a lot of arguments with people saying we need that big Hollywood catharsis where Schindler falls to his knees and says, ‘Yes, I know what I’m doing—now I must do it!’ and goes full steam ahead. That was the last thing I wanted…. I’m not sure he really felt that during the war. It was a lot easier for him to define his own actions after he had taken them. I also felt that it would have been too melodramatic of me to have invented a reason for him. It would have been too easy for the sort of couch-potato tastes of American audiences, who demand easy answers to complicated questions. I felt it would have been a disservice to Schindler’s deeds to have manufactured something just because I couldn’t find it in real life.”

Even some who admire the film object to the scene of Schindler’s breakdown as he bids farewell to his workers, considering it an unfortunate lapse into the kind of sentimentality the film otherwise avoids. But Spielberg’s instincts as a popular artist made him recognize that both the characters and the audience need an emotional catharsis, releasing the mingled feelings of communal solidarity and loss that have been forcibly pent up throughout the three-hour film. Presented with a gold ring in which his workers have inscribed the Talmud’s words, “Whoever saves one life saves the world entire,” Schindler is stricken with guilt. He confesses to Stern, “I could have got more out. I could have got more.” Looking over his remaining valuables, Schindler
haltingly admits his car would have been worth ten people and his gold swastika pin “would have given me two more—at least one. It would have given me one. One more. One more person. A person is dead—for this. I could have got one more person and I didn’t.”

Schindler’s mournful litany reminds the audience that, however many persons he and others managed to save, there were millions more who perished. Any celebration of survival in the context of the Holocaust, Spielberg acknowledges, must be seen in the shadow of overwhelming loss. At key points throughout the film, he stresses this complexity in visual terms, such as showing a long line of people entering the gas chamber as Schindler’s women leave the shower room alive. David Thomson claimed in
Film
Comment
that “when those saved hurry to trains, the camera (or their eyes) does not pan away to note those less fortunate.” But that is exactly what Spielberg does with his camera, showing another group of victims arriving in Auschwitz as the Schindler Jews hurry to their trains. While Schindler and Stern are drawing up their list of people to save from extermination, the viewer is painfully aware that in bringing the selection to an end, Schindler inevitably is condemning others to die. When Schindler ransoms his women from Auschwitz, the camp commandant tries to interest him instead in “three hundred units” of Hungarian Jews from another train; in rejecting those Jews in favor of
his
Jews, Schindler is playing God and condemning the others to death. Such are the terrible moral paradoxes of this story, insoluble dilemmas Spielberg does not shrink from acknowledging. This is the opposite of sentimentality. When Schindler humbly confesses, “I didn’t do enough,” he is speaking not only as a wealthy man whose virtues are inextricably mixed with human weaknesses, he is also speaking for the entire world that abandoned the Jews.

For all its emphasis on rescue and survival, the film does not provide audiences the simple and consolatory “happy ending” some of its detractors accused it of offering. “This is a movie about World War II in which all the Jews live,” J. Hoberman claimed in
The
Village
Voice.
“The selection is ‘life,’ the Nazi turns out to be a good guy, and human nature is revealed to be sunny and bright. It’s a total reversal.” Such a grotesque caricature of
Schin
dler’s
List
illustrates not only the difficulty of communicating the complexities of the Holocaust in a popular entertainment medium, but also the stubbornly enduring resistance to Spielberg’s artistry among some segments of the self-styled American intellectual elite.

One of the readers of
Commentary
who took exception to Philip Gourevitch’s intemperate assault on the film was Rabbi Uri D. Herscher of Los Angeles’s Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion, who wrote: “I lost so many relatives in the Holocaust; maybe that is why I found the film so appealing and, finally, so uplifting. Is it a perfect film? What would a perfect film be about the Holocaust? For me it is enough that it is an extraordinarily—even though painfully—absorbing film which
demonstrates
the splendor of human sympathies and humanitarian passion.” A Holocaust survivor,
Norbert Friedman of West Hempstead, New York, wrote in his letter to
Commentary,
“No matter what the critics say, no matter what the public’s reactions, for us, the survivors, there is only one response, a response usually reserved for another survivor when he concludes giving public testimony. That is appreciatively and warmly to embrace Steven Spielberg in the silent act of bonding.”

Rabbi Albert Lewis, Spielberg’s Hebrew school teacher during his childhood in New Jersey, sees
Schindler’s
List
as “Steven’s gift to his mother, to his people, and in a sense to himself. Now he is a full human being, and for a long while he was alienated from his people. He wrestled with himself, in a sense; it was a little like the story in the Bible of Jacob wrestling with the angel. He suddenly realized what it’s all about.”

A
S
he approached the milestone of his fiftieth birthday—which he passed on December 18, 1996—Spielberg showed no signs of being crushed under the enormous weight of his success. Many a lesser career has collapsed from the burden of escalating expectations, and Spielberg, who still bites his fingernails and throws up before coming to the set in the morning, cannot help feeling the “horrendous” pressure of having to top himself, of simply having to be Steven Spielberg. But throughout his twenty-eight years as a professional filmmaker, he has maintained a sense of inner balance that so far has enabled him to avoid losing his nerve. He seems comfortable (even if others are not) with his own complexities and contradictions.

To some observers, it may have appeared that the choice facing Spielberg about where to take his directing career was plain and clearcut: He either could make more “message” movies like
Schindler’
s
List
or regress to making more Indiana Jones movies and movies about dinosaurs. But though Spielberg evolved as a result of
Schindler’s
List,
he did not suddenly change into someone else. On the last day of principal photography on
Jurassic
Park,
he said, “I feel I have a responsibility. And I want to go back and forth from entertainment to socially conscious movies.” When he returned to directing after a long break to recover from the emotional and physical exhaustion of filming those two movies, he proved he meant what he said. The feature film project he chose to follow
Schindler’s
List
was
The
Lost
World,
the sequel to
Jurassic
Park.
||||

Going back to sheer entertainment was a way of keeping his creative equilibrium. The traditional American dichotomy between art and entertainment is a stubbornly enduring part of the nation’s puritan heritage, but for Spielberg, pleasing himself and pleasing his audience have almost always
gone hand-in-hand. When high school friend Chuck Case visited him at the Long Beach Airport during the filming of
1941,
Spielberg surveyed his army of uniformed actors and World War II airplanes and said with a childlike smile, “You know, they
pay
me to do this.”
Schindler’s
List
demonstrated that, at least in the case of a great popular artist such as Steven Spielberg, artistry and popularity need not be mutually exclusive.

“You’ve tackled one of the darkest chapters in history,” an interviewer said to him. “Can you go back to making sunny, optimistic movies?”

“Sure I can,” he replied with a laugh, “because I have a sunny, optimistic nature. But I don’t think the two are mutually exclusive.”

S
PIELBERG’S
planned year-long hiatus from directing—an event so earthshaking in Hollywood it was announced on the front page of
Daily
Variety
—eventually stretched to three years. Those were among the busiest years of his life, although much of his activity took place behind the scenes on two ambitious projects that illustrate how richly divergent his interests have become. In 1994, he launched both his new studio, DreamWorks SKG, and his Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, a worldwide program to videotape the testimonies of Holocaust survivors and rescuers. He called the Shoah project “the most important job I’ve ever done…. People say, ‘What are you doing after
Schindler’s
List?’
Well, this is my next project…. I’ve dedicated the rest of my life to being involved in taking testimony as long as there are survivors who want to volunteer it.”

Seeded with $6 million of his earnings from
Schindler’s
List,
the nonprofit project was budgeted at $60 million for its first three years, receiving additional funding from such donors as the Lew Wasserman Foundation, MCA/Universal, Time Warner, and NBC. Spielberg’s contribution was part of the estimated $40 million his Righteous Persons Foundation announced it would donate to various organizations in its first seven to ten years. Other donations it has made have included a long-term grant yielding $3 million to the U.S. Holocaust Museum; $1 million to New York City’s Museum of Jewish Heritage; $500,000 to the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University; and $300,000 to Synagogue 2000, a group developing an innovative model for synagogues in the twenty-first century. Spielberg also provided funding to Bill Moyers for a public television series on the Book of Genesis, Jon Blair for his Oscar-winning documentary
Anne
Frank
Remem
bered,
and Elizabeth Swados for a film on racism and anti-Semitism,
The
Hating
Pot.