This is an entry in "The Big Ones," a series covering 32 classic films for the first time on The Dancing Image. There are spoilers.
When
Schindler's List was released in 1993, it was regarded as a breakthrough, a true turning point in Steven Spielberg's career when the wunderkind director finally became a "grown-up." In fact, the movie is very much a culmination of his previous films, more of a crescendo to his early period than a harbinger of his later work. It is a film of flourishes, grand gestures and set pieces, full of heroism and villainy with a larger-than-life backdrop and clearly delineated moral stakes. For this reason, this extremely popular and widely acclaimed movie had a fair number of detractors on its release. They focused on the sentimentality of certain moments (especially Schindler's tearful plea at the end of the movie) and the selectivity of its focus, choosing to dwell on the positive in such an overwhelmingly negative subject. Stanley Kubrick, a friend and posthumous collaborator of Spielberg, supposedly noted that
Schindler's List was a story about success, but the Holocaust was all about failure, and J. Hoberman dismissed the movie with the rhetorical question, "Is it possible to make a feel-good movie about the ultimate feel-bad experience of the 20th century?"
These criticisms could be viewed as footnotes to the film's overwhelming success but they speak to a larger phenomenon, a deep-seated critical and intellectual antipathy toward Spielberg (along with an acknowledgement that he can't merely be dismissed, but must be debunked). They're also important because they remind us of that essential fact - that
Schindler's List grows out of Spielberg's earlier body of work - and they are interesting because of what came later, especially
Munich. Indeed, that film makes an interesting companion piece to the earlier one, in terms of subject matter, narrative approach, and stylistic inclinations. It comes from a period where Spielberg had overcome some of the critical hurdles that still faced him with
Schindler's List, and when a truer break with the early films had been made. I would argue that the real turning point in Spielberg's filmography arrives not with
Schindler's List, or
The Color Purple, or
Saving Private Ryan, any of his other self-consciously "adult" films dealing with real-world historical subjects, but with a science fiction film at the dawn of the new millennium. Beginning with
AI Artificial Intelligence, Spielberg's work darkened - or rather the darkness that had always been there came to the forefront, coinciding with a breakdown in the strict discipline Spielberg films always enjoyed.
Munich belongs to this new period of uncertainty and messiness;
Schindler's List definitely does not although it contains hints of the darkness and maturity to come.
