SCHINDLER’S LIST (Directed by Steven Spielberg. Starring Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley, Ralph Fiennes, Caroline Goodall, Jonathan Sagalle, Embeth Davidtz)

It is not hard to imagine why Steven Spielberg changed the title of Thomas Keneally’s book. Given the director’s pedigree, Schindler’s Ark might have been mistaken for Indy’s one: Raiders Of The Chosen People or Indiana Jones And The Camps Of Doom. Nazis in Spielberg’s relentlessly populist oeuvre have been figures of fun, not fear. “I hate these guys,” Harrison Ford mutters after coming face to face with Hitler in a comic moment of Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade. With their pompous uniforms, their fanciful salute, their fascist ideology and their historical fate, Nazis are easy targets, a populist shorthand not just for evil but for evil defeated by good. One is never in any doubt that Indiana Jones, the lone American hero, is going to make fools of his Nazi enemies and win his share of the war single-handed.

Oskar Schindler was an altogether more complex figure, living in a world where the everyday reality was genuinely more terrifying than any of the supernatural horrors faced by Indy. An opportunist German businessman who thrived during the war by exploiting free Jewish labour, Schindler ultimately had his conscience stirred to such a degree by the appalling events surrounding him that this most selfish of men was moved to the most selfless of actions, risking all to save as many Jews as he could from the horrors of the holocaust.

There is a problem with reviewing this film, much the same problem (I imagine) as was faced making it. It is the glibness with which one can write the word ‘holocaust’, and the inability of that word to express its true meaning. Some six million Jews (and others deemed undesirable) died in the violent extermination that Nazi ideology called the final solution. It is a figure beyond human comprehension, a scale of horror too large for the mind to really grasp, and undoubtedly for a piece of art (film, book or painting) to encompass. Yet Schindler’s List is an attempt to do just that, to bring home a true sense of the horror and put a human face on the people who faced it, and to do so in the populist terms of mainstream Hollywood entertainment.

On past form, there is little evidence that Spielberg is up to the task. Technically, he is one of the most talented directors in contemporary cinema, with sure-fire story-telling abilities to match his impressive command of film vocabulary. Time and again he has demonstrated that he is a showman without parallel, a crowd-pleaser with an instinct for the common denominator, even if it’s usually the lowest one. But emotionally his films have leaned towards the sentimental, and been shot through with a childlike sense of wonder. While this undoubtedly contributed to E.T.’s and Jurassic Park’s world-beating success, it has effectively sabotaged his more adult films. Not since his earliest work, notably Sugarland Express and Jaws, has Spielberg created convincing adult characters. His over-emotional adaptation of The Colour Purple was disastrously rose tinted, Empire Of The Sun was spoiled by the director’s tear-jerking instincts and his supernatural love story, Always, is so mawkish it makes Ghost look hard-hearted.

Schindler’s List is all the more inspiring in being, for most of its 3 hours and 15 minutes, an oddly dispassionate work. It may well bring tears to your eyes, but they arise through the genuine suffering and heroism the story chronicles, and not through contrived filmic manipulation and the swelling of strings on the soundtrack. While beautifully lit, and carefully constructed, it is Spielberg’s most understated film. There are few shots that draw attention to themselves. Instead the black and white footage is invested with an almost ciné verité edge that adds credibility to a range of complex but convincingly low key performances.

It is set up like a thriller, drawing us into the manipulative Schindler’s life while the events of history swirl about in the background. Schindler’s reaction to the creation of a Jewish ghetto, the pillaging of Jewish homes and businesses and the shipping off of his (unpaid) Jewish workforce is “What’s in it for me?” Playing with his emotional cards face down, Liam Neeson is an ambiguously charismatic central character. For much of the film you don’t know whether to like him or loathe him. Schindler exists on the knife edge of good and bad, and (satisfyingly) it remains as much of a mystery what tips him one way (towards good) as what must have tipped Plaszow camp commandant Amon Goeth the other.

Ralph Fiennes is bravely given the room to create a complex portrayal of a human monster. Goeth is almost Schindler’s alter ego, a charming playboy with an infantile emotional range and a touch of encroaching madness brought on by the absolute power that is corrupting his soul. In the polarised relationship between these two, Spielberg sets up a case study of man’s capacity for good and evil, subtly reminding the viewer that it was human beings who perpetrated these outrages, not creatures from beyond our reckoning. In Schindler’s List, Spielberg’s Nazis are no longer buffoons, but well-rounded characters capable of anything (a guard pats a child’s head while ushering others to their doom). This time, the joke is on us.

And, what’s more, it’s not funny. The sheerly relentless and sometimes surreal nature of much of the violence (Goeth picking off camp prisoners at random with his sniper’s rifle, soldiers shooting a man who has strapped himself to the underside of his bed in a vain attempt to hide) invests it with an edge of black comedy comparable to Man Bites Dog, but it is just too heartlessly convincing to garner any response other than shocked silence. Spielberg slowly, almost covertly introduces us to a range of Jewish characters, at first featured in the background to the main plot, before detailing their suffering, their ingenuity in the face of death-dealing bureaucracy, their helplessness in the face of overwhelming might and their heart-rending despair at the terrible fates of those closest to them, with graphic detail. The man who gave us benign aliens and PG-rated killer dinosaurs pulls no punches in his depiction of the holocaust. When a man is shot, black blood spurts in a fountain from his head. A child hides from soldiers by lowering himself up to his neck in the shit of a latrine. Schindler’s List does not clamber to a climax of horror, it pitches itself squarely in a world where horror exists as an everyday fact of life. This is an extremely violent film, yet one where the sense of redeeming humanity is ever-present.

Speilberg’s real achievement is to make it all so watchable. Schindler’s List is not a movie that will reduce you to a state of unbearable depression. It is a tense, intelligent, exciting, frightening, at times funny tale which, in its celebration of Schindler’s discovery of his own humanity, and in the dignity of the Jewish victims in the face of such inhumanity, is ultimately extremely moving. It is almost a masterpiece, but at the 11th hour (at least it felt like the 11th) the old Spielberg rears his soppy head.

After the London premiere, Spielberg requested that people leave quietly and go home with their thoughts. My own thoughts at that moment were ‘God, that dragged on a bit, let’s get a drink before the pubs close.’ Now I’m being facetious, which seems almost sinful in the context, but I think the film-maker was being presumptuous and self-important. I know the holocaust lasted for many years, but Schindler’s List lasts 3 hours and 15 minutes, which is at least half an hour too long. At the end the pace slackens, the thriller elements let up, and we are subjected to a slow, drawn-out conclusion, with much speechmaking and a drafted in scene of emotional breakdown that, in its patent Hollywood phoniness, undermines the genuine emotions the film inspires.

While most of the film sticks close to the book (itself drawn from the testaments of survivors) Spielberg invents a scene in which the usually restrained Schindler weeps and wails about lives he could have saved. The scene has a purpose: to underline for the audience the value of each human life and remind us of the bigger picture, the huge scale of the tragedy. Yet it is so out of character, both with Schindler and with the manner in which Spielberg has told his tale, that in the film’s final throes, Schindler’s List becomes a cause, instead of an entertainment. The ponderous credits, an homage to the dead, further inflate the self-important tone. Schindler’s List gives us a compelling catalogue of horrors but, in these last moments it is as if Spielberg, usually amongst the most single-mindedly entertaining of directors, has forgotten that cinema audiences can face anything but boredom.

Despite the flawed ending, Schindler’s List is as close to essential viewing as a movie can get, especially in a time when, as events in the former Yugoslavia constantly remind us, the Nazi solution does not seem so final anymore.