In October of 1980, a writer on his way back home walked into a store to in L.A. to buy some luggage. When the proprieter of the store learned his customer was a writer, he said he had a story for him. Naturally, the writer was wary, since all writers hear that from time to time. But this story turned into a book two years later, and that book became a film a decade later, when the most financially successful director in Hollywood decided to not only deal with his heritage, but also the charge that he couldn't make a grown-up movie. The result, of course, was Steven Spielberg's SCHINDLER'S LIST.
One charge usually raised at critics is hype - if you say each movie you see is "inspiring" or "life-changing" or other hyperbolic terms, you pretty much rob those terms of their meaning, and set up the movie for a fall. Usually, this charge is levelled at "quote-whore" critics (those who put their names on an ad just to put their names on an ad), but so-called serious critics were charged with hype as well in trying to describe SCHINDLER'S LIST. Even those who praised the movie wondered if a movie could really do what some critics thought is was ("life-changing" and "the most important movie ever made" among them). Well, a movie may be a small thing in itself, but to deride its impact is to wonder why people go to movies in the first place. And no, movies aren't history, nor should they be. And they are not teaching tools, nor should they be (that is, they shouldn't be created just to teach, or preach). And SCHINDLER'S LIST was hardly the first movie to deal with the Holocaust. And this wasn't Spielberg's first grown-up movie - neither SUGARLAND EXPRESS and EMPIRE OF THE SUN were the work of, to quote Spielberg's many detractors, someone who exclusively had a Peter Pan complex. And some of those "childlike" films have been masterpieces - E.T. comes to mind - and he didn't completely abandon those gifts for this movie. Finally, all claims to the contrary, it is not a masterpiece, because of one flawed scene near the end (to be fair, there's much disagreement about that scene, which we'll get to later). But SCHINDLER'S LIST is a damn good movie, and if it helped raise the consciousness of people when it comes to the Holocaust - at a time when Holocaust deniers are at their most public - so much the better.
