The Sacramento Bee from Sacramento, California • 79

THE SACRAMENTO BEg FINAL December 24 1993 TICKET IS Spielberg makes a liarro wing masterpiece on the Holocaust litmaxmz-oz By Joe Baltake Bee Movie Critic A A FTith his brave new film Steven Spielberg not only tackles a subject largely been ignored by mainstream Hollywood but manages to handle it in an accessible pulpy way that detract from the gravity of the material based on Australian writer Thomas 1982 novel is one of many horrific stories about what is inarguably this greatest crime the Nazi persecution of Jews during World War II Adolf Final Solution the methodically planned extermination of European Jewry is something Hollywood has either avoided or dealt with circuitously At best get something like George Diary of Anne (1959) a fine film which nevertheless left the painful moments the death camps and crematoriums off-screen along with the moral complexity Any documentation about the Holocaust has been left to books like Lucy War Against the to such filmed oral histories as Marcel Sorrow and the (1970) and Claude (1985) and to European movies the most recent being Agnieszka (1991) inside of shell casings the death camp Liam Neesoa convinces an SS guard that their tiny hands are needed to polish the To save his workers' daughters from thing from an movie as set in a movie-ish Krakow nightclub where the opportunistic industrialist Schindler courts Nazi officials getting ahead in business The year is 1939 and the Nazis are there to prepare Jews for their descent into hell Men women and children are taken from their homes and relocated in the cramped self-contained Plaszow sub-camp before being shipped to largest graveyard in the Auschwitz One loss is another gain Schindler appropriates one of the luxury apartments for himself and comes up with the idea of taking over a formerly Jewish-owned enamel factory where by using Jewish slave labor produce field-kitchen equipment for the German army His need for available Jews is what unwittingly leads to this war profi- enlightenment and conversion: Oskar Schindler at first But now Spielberg has confronted the subject and without wincing or creating any safe distance between his audience and the horrors on the screen created an exceptionally detailed look at one corner one story of the Holocaust succeeding by keeping it small and intimate and by shrewdly locating his suspense also managed to find one Holocaust story that has a reasonably happy ending offering some surcease from the pain is about survivors and although Spielberg shot his movie in black and white often using a hand-held camera and thereby giving it the harsh look of a documentary or a foreign film (a Nazi home movie actually) his pacing is strictly American Spielberg who dealt with Nazis in his trilogy but clearly in a different way definitely nurtures a cumulative feeling His first scene here in fact in which he introduces Oskar Schindler (played by Liam Nee- son) could actually be some- ferent way Instead of the big special effects we get small wrenching moments such as prisoners forced to extract gold teeth from their deceased peers screaming mothers running after truckloads of children being transported to their deaths and terrorized naked and half-starved Polish Jews being humiliated in every way possible and then arbitrarily shotM -VV moments like this just happen often without warning and you never quite adjust to the shock or to the painful realization of the finality and sheer waste of it all Spielberg effectively produces the feeling of dread leaving us as devasted and as haunted as his characters made more than a Holocaust movie a thoughtful meditation on some very real and unfathomable memories that refuse to go away and be resolve or alas corrected laborator and friend Ralph Fiennes is even better as Amon Goeth the complex commandant of Plaszow But Neeson has problems One of the minor flaws is that conversion never really takes place or at least not in the slow evolutionary way expect Instead Spielberg films it artily as a recurring epiphenomenal moment involving a little girl in a coat who Schindler occasionally spots among groups of Jews and later sees dead her body at the top of a heap of other corpses The smudgy red of her coat which has a hand-tinted look is a commanding image among all the black and white Still the conceit is a little too easy and not worthy of the devastat- ing film that surrounds it Much of has Spielberg doing what always done best putting the squeeze on emotions of his" audience only in a clearly dif Schindler's List Cast: Liam Neeson Ben Kingsley Ralph Fiennes Caroline Goodall Jonathan Sagalle and Embeth Davidtz Director: Steven Spielberg Writer: Steven Zaillian (Screenplay based on a book by Thomas Keneally Cinematographer Janusz Kaminski Composer: John Williams Distributor: Universal Running time: 195 minutes Opens Saturday at Century Rated in order to run his factory and make money would save the lives of nearly 1100 Jews 297 women and 801 men survivor who came to call themselves Schindlerjuden list Ben Kinglsey gives an indelible performance as Itzhak Stern a quiet Jewish bookkeeper who becomes col.