Tampa Bay Times from St. Petersburg, Florida • 64

On Screen YOUR WEEKLY LOOK AT THE LATEST AND GREATEST MOVES, TELEVISION AND VIDEO MOVIE REVIEW Schindler's List Grade: A DtlDLTQCa Director Steven Spielberg Cast: Liam Neeson, Ben Kngsley, Ralph Fiennes, Caroline Goodall, Embeth Davidtz Screenplay: Steven Zaillian, from the book by Thomas Keneally Rating: violence, nudity, profanity, sexual situations Running time: 193 min. By STEVE PERSALL Times Film Critic Steven Spielberg uses his genius in a manner and subject area far removed from his previous thrillers. The result is a chilling chronicle of the Holocaust that rivets audiences scene after scene. History has recorded the Holocaust as the ultimate example of the ultimate evil, but to Oskar Schindler, the extermination of millions of Jews in Nazi Germany was simply "bad business." Schindler was a canny war profiteer who fortified his enamelware factory with Jewish laborers. As long as they proved themselves to be "essential workers," those workers weren't sent to concentration camps or killed and the industrialist's factory kept humming on cheap labor.

Oskar Schindler's obsession with the bottom line eventually saved at least 1,100 Jews from Hitler's final solution; a strange, unknowing sort of heroism that is the subject of Schindler's List, a towering cinematic accomplishment from director Steven Spielberg that left all other 1993 films in its wake. By now, we expect to be amazed by any film directed by him, but never before in such serious fashion. After all the dinosaurs, sharks and space visitors, Spielberg casts his eye on history's worst monster the deadly intolerance of genocidal Nazis toward Jews with i Universal Pictures PLAYING GOD: Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson) and Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley) assemble a list of more than 1,100 Jewish workers to be placed under protection. World War II on the horizon. Schindler's List is as remarkable as E.T.,Jaws or Jurassic Park, without the manipulative method and whiz-bang special effects for which Spielberg is known.

This time, Spielberg doesn't want our tears or fears; he wants our attention. He grabs it throttles it, really with one stunning image or thrilling sequence after another. There is an understandable, yet atypical, anger underpinning his work here; an urgency to tell a vital, personal saga. Spielberg doesn't want to thrill us as usual. Yet he does just that, with a mature expertise that none of his previous films could prepare us for.

Schindler's List is complex, brutal, fascinating and finally uplifting an amazingly far cry from Spielberg's trademark style. There are moviegoers who will automatically assume they've seen this kind of story before, in the countless Holocaust dramas created for films and television, or acclaimed doc If l.ili director refuses to use a single familiar figure to illustrate a society gone mad. Most strikingly, Schindler's List doesn't merely portray the Jewish prisoners as timid lambs being led to slaughter, or stoic victims that beg us to admire their courage. For these people, fear leads to resourcefulness as they struggle to escape detection, detention and poverty. Diamonds are pressed into bread balls and swallowed, a cord pulls a throw rug over a secretive trap door hiding place, even a feces-drenched toilet becomes an unsanitary lifesaver.

Jews who wore uniforms as monitors of the ghetto for the Nazis are painted as no worse than ingenious opportunists, as naively unaware as anyone of how far their captors will carry their final solution. Those horrors become evident to the Jews and the audience in the same fashion, a sudden, crushingly violent sequence depicting the liquidation of the Kracow ghetto. Spielberg adopts a semi-documentary, you-are-there style for this gut-wrenching sequence, using a hand-held camera fleeing with the Jews, while the sounds of terror echo around them. Reportedly, he often manned those cameras himself to get the desired shot Spielberg made a risky decision to film Schindler's List in stark black-and-white; color would have softened the terrifying images and, anyway, our knowledge of the Holocaust is primarily through black-and-white photographs. Cinematographer Janusz Kaminski turned that gamble into an aesthetic bonanza; Schindler's List is one of the finest examples of the monochromatic medium of the modern era, on a level with Gordon Willis' Manhattan and Robert Surtees' The Last Picture Show.

Color intrudes only in select splashes, symbolizing faith in the midst of carnage; the lighting of Sabbath candles in a prologue (and, later, the flicker of others), an emotional epilogue and, most strikingly, in the red coat worn by a young girl Schindler spots amid the pogrom. It's the sight of her that awakens Schindler's soul and, later, prompts him into action the only cinematic indulgence Spielberg allows himself, and a successful one. The performances by a cast of largely unknown actors are impeccable; so natural that Schindler's List often feels like watching a documentary. They benefit from a uniquely intelligent script by Steven Zaillian (Awakenings, Searching for Bobby Fischer) that clearly defines this complex tale of politics and personalities with the verve of an electrifying thriller. Liam Neeson is astounding in a role that, like Schindler himself, tiptoes the line between heroism and destructive greed.

The performance is a model of effective restraint; a portrayal as calcu- Universal Pictures TOUCHED BY PROVIDENCE: Poldek Pfefferberg (Jonathan Sagalle) and his wife Mila (Adi Nitzan) are among the workers put under Swindler's protection. umentaries like Shoah. What sets Schindler's List apart from any other Holocaust drama is what it doesn't show us. Spielberg declines to rely upon tragic cliches. We never see the typical shot of a Jewish prisoner's concentration camp identification tattoo; that" a too-simple symbol of their incarceration, rather than the dense aura of steadily enclosing evil that Spielberg creates.

Adolf Hitler is only seen once in a photograph in the background, as the 4 TIMES FRIDAY, JANUARY 7,1994.