Heart of Darkness

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Life rushes on. We are distracted. We forget things. And sometimes we will ourselves to this forgetfulness, especially of those aspects of the past that pain us deeply. Or shame us greatly.

American movies mostly cater to this amnesia. If their primary task is to help us escape our trials of the moment, one of their secondary goals is to ease the burdens of the past. These days, history in the movies is essentially set decoration, something shimmering and elegant to place behind the well- spoken characters of a Merchant-Ivory film once a year, a Martin Scorsese film once a lifetime. The past is almost never seen as a tragic force. Or as something that contains a certain few shattering, shaping occurrences with which each generation must come to terms anew if it is to retain its moral footing.

The Holocaust is such an event. It is a topic -- the systematic destruction of European Jewry under Nazism -- that American movies have taken up gingerly, and only occasionally. It has been left mostly to the documentarians and to Europeans like Agnieszka Holland, who made the devastating Europa, Europa. But these are art-house films with small audiences.

That's why the release next week of Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List is a consequential event. It is a high-profile, big-studio film, produced and directed by the most popular filmmaker of our era, possibly of all time (four of the top 10 grossing movies ever are Spielberg's, including the biggest of them all, this year's Jurassic Park). These factors alone would grant it an access to the mainstream public consciousness that no other movie on this subject has enjoyed. The fact that it is a very good movie means it has a chance to lodge there instructively, and perhaps permanently.

"The movie simply needed my clout to get it made," Spielberg says, and he is not being immodest. Since no filmmaker has a track record like his, none has his power to encourage both a studio and the young mass audience to take a risk on a movie the subject of which is inherently repellent, not to say terrifying.

At the same time, Spielberg says, "this movie didn't need my strengths as a storyteller because the story's already been told." Here he is being too modest. It was surely the screen storyteller in him who responded to the compelling narrative strength of Thomas Keneally's novelized life of a German- Czech named Oskar Schindler, who came to Poland to make money out of its - occupation by the Nazis and stayed to preserve 1,100 Jews -- workers in the enamelware factory he established -- from the death camps.

That storyteller must also have understood that even though Schindler, a hypnotically ambiguous character -- he was a drinker, womanizer, black marketeer and con artist -- was operating in a charnel house, he was finally that classically empathetic, inspirational figure, the lone individual doing good in a desperately dangerous context. If you could get an audience to accept that context, you could involve them with a man who, though antiheroic in some of his behavior, was in his essence a movie hero of quite a familiar, beloved kind.

Finally, that storyteller, a master of movie technique, must have sensed in this tale elements that would bring out the best in him. Spielberg has always been a man who likes to work on big, crowded canvases, but he has never challenged his skills with a subject so dense and dark as this one, never used them with more tact or to better dramatic and emotional effect. There is a kind of morality -- a respect for one's tools and materials and for the intelligence of the beholder's eye -- in the craftsmanship he has deployed. It serves the interests of the tale, not the ego of the teller. In the annals of Hollywood "clout," this is almost as astonishing as the movie itself.

Or as Spielberg told the cast, "we're not making a film, we're making a document." Documents, of course, are printed in black and white, and so is Schindler's List. To Spielberg, these are the colors of reality. They may also be part of an effort to find the cinematic equivalent to the style of Keneally's 1982 novel, which is marvelously understated -- the only way to go, really, when your subject is so overwhelming that all but the simplest words are bound to fail it.

Spielberg strove for a similar artlessness with his camera. The film was made on location in Cracow, using the actual factory Schindler operated, even the apartment he once inhabited. The scenes in which the Jews are forced into the ghetto or endure the torments of camp life are shot documentary style, with hand-held cameras. As Spielberg says: "I didn't want to direct off a Cecil B. DeMille crane. I wanted to do more CNN reporting with a camera I could hold in my hand." To enhance this effect, he eschewed storyboards for only the third time in his 14 films. Instead in some sequences he filled several streets with hundreds of extras, rehearsed them extensively, then sent his cameras and the actors who had lines to speak into the melee, often requiring them to improvise dialogue and bits of business.

The process energized Spielberg, who "felt liberated for the first time in my career." He was finally realizing a dream he first entertained more than a decade ago and delayed while awaiting both the script he wanted (it was provided by Steven Zaillian, writer-director of Searching for Bobby Fischer) and the maturity in himself he felt he needed. Onlookers say he never sat down, never retreated to his trailer, and that he one day made an astonishing 51 setups. Yet always he moved in an aura of "austere calm . . . a man at peace with himself," in the words of co-producer Gerald Molen. At some point, impeccable professionalism simply merged with obsession.

Ben Kingsley, who plays Itzhak Stern, the Jewish accountant who both cooked the books for Schindler's lifesaving scams and served as guide to his conscience, was astonished at Spielberg's nerve: "I didn't think he would have the courage and the panache and the command to fill an area of five blocks, a big area of action where you are receiving information from what's happening in the foreground, in the midground and also in your peripheral vision." But these are among the greatest sequences of chaos and mass terror ever filmed.

By contrast, the scenes in which Schindler befriends the German command, the better to suborn them with bribes and favors, first to advance his own interests, later to protect his workers, are filmed in the high formal style of the 1930s and '40s. The style is as cool and calculated as Schindler himself, played with a kind of impenetrable bonhomie by Liam Neeson. The work here comes close to satirizing the antique conventions of espionage dramas.

Its function is also to set the stage for the savagery of Schindler's dark double and most dangerous antagonist, Amon Goeth, commandant of the nearby labor camp, played by Ralph Fiennes in the film's most compelling performance. A man of Schindler's own age and background, he likes to sit on the balcony of his house idly shooting prisoners who happen to wander into his gunsight. He keeps as a servant a Jewish woman named Helen Hirsch (Embeth Davidtz), whom he constantly beats and humiliates precisely because against all dictates of ideology, he loves her. The point about this man is that like Nazism itself, his irrationality cannot be contained by any appeal to civility, any system of legal or moral constraint. He is evil in all its banality, all its primal ferocity.

To re-create evil, especially in situ, and especially on this scale and at this length (3 hr., 15 min.), is of course to confront it. And the experience was shattering. As Spielberg walked through his crowds of extras, gesturing people this way and that because he did not speak their language, it suddenly occurred to him that Josef Mengele, the notorious concentration-camp physician, "gestured people to the left or the right. One direction was death; the other was one more day of life. I felt like a Nazi."

For Spielberg, "the worst days came any time I had to have people take their clothes off and be humiliated and reduce themselves down to livestock. That's what tore me up the most. It was the worst experience in my life." Embeth Davidtz agrees. She was in one of these scenes, nude, her head shaved. "It's not like a love scene where you disrobe and there's something in the moment. Here I'm standing there like a plucked chicken, nothing but skin and bone." That is to say, stripped of human dignity.

And there was no surcease. Leaden skies poured rain and snow almost every day of the company's three-month stay in Poland. "I went in there thinking you separate work from life," says Davidtz. "It's the first time that didn't happen." The goofing around that usually makes the boredom and hardships of difficult movie locations bearable was not available to this company. "The ghosts were on the set every day in their millions," says Kingsley. As Spielberg recalls, "There was no break in the tension. Nobody felt there was any room for levity," and people were always "breaking down or cracking up." This he had anticipated, he says, "but I didn't expect so much sadness every day."

The result of this relentless passion is not perfect. What enterprise of this scope and intensity possibly could be? In concentrating on the scope of their suffering, the film has lost a certain particularity among the victims. It lacks highly individual characters who would embody and dramatize their suffering. Something of Schindler himself has also been lost in the transition to the screen. Keneally conceived him as a man who admired his own cleverness and may have derived the same sardonic pleasure from taking Jews away from the Nazis as he did from taking money away from them in exchange for flawed products.

This is a point made more tacitly than explicitly in the film. Missing * entirely is Keneally's tantalizing suggestion that this quite untutored man may have somehow imagined before anyone else (including many Nazis) that the drift of their policies could carry them to only one place -- genocide. Added to the movie, unfortunately, is a blatantly sentimental concluding scene in which Schindler breaks down hysterically because he might have saved even more people but did not. Keneally is distressed by that passage. But he also, and correctly, insists the movie "isn't at all untrue to the spirit of Schindler . . . to that ambiguity that attracted me to him in the first place -- the scoundrel savior." More important, the movie arrives when it is very obviously needed. The few survivors of the Holocaust are old now, and dying, and the task of remembering, of testifying, must pass to members of Spielberg's generation and others still younger. It is a hopeful sign, perhaps, that the new Holocaust Museum in Washington is being taxed by more visitors than it can handle. It is a less hopeful sign that this year a public-opinion poll revealed nearly 25% of young Americans either have not heard of the Holocaust or are uncertain of what the term means. Here and elsewhere around the world, pseudo-scholars argue that it never happened at all, and there are people happy to hear this mad denial.

In this climate, Spielberg claims "no high expectations for the box-office potential" of his movie. But these days, acts of conscience (Spielberg will donate any profits, or "blood money" as he calls it, to Holocaust charities) have their curiosity value, not to mention Oscar value. He may yet be surprised by his film's power to create answering acts of conscientiousness on the part of moviegoers. He may be surprised -- happily and deservedly so.

With reporting by Georgia Harbison and Jeffrey Ressner/Washington