DVD Review

Schindler's List (2004)

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HOLOCAUST HERO Neeson and Ben Kingsley consult the ''List'' in Spielberg's stark, gripping film

Schindler's List: David James

Credits

Rated: R; DVD Release Date: Mar 09, 2004; Genres: Biopic, Drama, Historical, War; With: Ralph Fiennes, Ben Kingsley and Liam Neeson; Distributors: MCA and Universal

By Joshua Rich

Joshua Rich

Joshua Rich is a staff editor for EW.com

Steven Spielberg crafted his landmark Holocaust story Schindler's List to look like a documentary, using black-and-white film to give it a newsreel authenticity and employing Steven Zaillian's straight-forward screenplay as a template that consistently rejects melodrama and lets the barbarity speak for itself. But so immediate and unadorned are the horrors therein that I haven't brought myself to watch the 1993 Best Picture -- about the enigmatic Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson), a war profiteer who saved 1,100 Jews from the concentration camps -- since I first saw it 10 years ago. (I know I'm not alone.)

My second viewing, then, comes on the release of this tastefully packaged inaugural DVD. It's a chance to take notice of elements I never fully appreciated before -- like John Williams' subdued score and Fiennes' haunting portrayal of a labor camp commandant. Above all, there's Oscar winner Spielberg's impressive discipline. How difficult must it have been for him to hold his anger in check and make a movie in which two primary characters are Nazis? How challenging to repeatedly film such violence and not blink?

Without a director's commentary track or many other bells and whistles, the DVD barely flirts with answering questions like these. But it's just as well; the movie alone would be enough. The supplements we do get, however, are worthwhile -- two documentaries, one a brief introduction to Spielberg's educationally minded Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, the other a feature-length film in which surviving Schindler Jews vividly recall their ravaged Polish community and the German-Catholic industrialist who saved them. ''Schindler was not an angel,'' says Leon Leyson. ''He didn't mind taking bribes and giving bribes. But he did a wonderful thing.''

Posted Mar 09, 2004

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