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What is the difference in making a MOVIE called "The Passion" and making the MOVIE "Schindler's List"? They are both MOVIES (interpretation of, as in, freedom to interpret)

Schindler's List (review of)

No-one, of course, would have gone to see an honest movie about the Holocaust. It would have been in German (or Czech, Polish, French, Dutch, etc.) with subtitles. It might begin with a middle-class Jewish family living comfortably in Germany in 1933. It would have tracked the changes in their life after Hitler's election; the events of Kristallnacht, November 10, 1938, as they are beaten up and their windows broken; their arrest and shipment to a concentration camp; at movie's end, they are gassed at Dachau; the final shot, smoke and ash billowing from incinerator smokestacks at night.

Schindler's List is dishonest because the number of Schindlers in Germany, or for that matter anywhere in Europe, was so small as to be statistically insignificant. But Hollywood cannot tell the story of the everyday or mainstream, not the humdrum ordinary or, apparently, even the horrible ordinary. Hollywood must always be about exceptions. Its films cannot portray everyday work; the employee must defy his boss, quit his job or rob his company at gunpoint. To relate the story of the extermination of six million Jews (and four million others, lets not forget; not only Jews died in the camps), Hollywood must pick the happy story of a man who rescued Jews, even though there were so few who did. (Why not tell the story of the teenage Roman Polanski instead? The family to which his father entrusted him as the Warsaw ghetto was being encircled sent him back--but kept the money they had been paid and all his belongings.)

Steven Spielberg is Jewish, but was incapable of making a story about the Jews; he must adopt a heroic Gentile as the center of his story. Why? He must have felt--lets grant the grace that these were all unconscious choices--that we Jews are still the outsider, the other, even in sympathetic America; that no-one would relate to a Jewish story. Schindler's List is of a piece with those movies about other ethnic groups that set a kindly white person in the foreground. Barbara Hershey in A World Apart; Donald Sutherland in A Dry White Season; Sissy Spacek in A Long Walk Home; Sam Waterston in The Killing Fields; all these examples come to mind, but there are hundreds of others.

There is a very revealing bit of business in Schindler that resembles a similar bit in The Killing Fields. When Schindler, atop the hill with his mistress, watches the clearing of the ghetto, amidst the black and white panorama, we see the sole touch of color in the whole movie: a little girl wearing a red dress. Why has Spielberg engaged in this fantasist touch? So that when the prisoners forced to burn bodies later come upon the little girl's corpse, we can recognize her, amidst the hundreds of other bodies, by the tatters of the red dress. In The Killing Fields, we see a more realistic or veristic scene, a man with a plastic bag on his head being dragged away; later, when Dith Pran passes the man's floating corpse, we recognize it by the bag. What's really going on here: in each case, the director needed a gimmick, a red dress or a plastic bag, to allow us to identify an otherwise anonymous, fungible corpse among the mass of corpses. In each case, its not hard (while acknowledging some real-world problems for the storyteller, to make a corpse noticeable, among so many) to detect a racist subtext: just as the other director may have needed the plastic bag because he feared that, to his audience, all Cambodians look alike, Spielberg may have feared that all his Jews (little girl included) would blend together, while only Schindler, the Gentile, stood out. And for the most part, the Jews in Schindler's List do blend together.

It is very hard also to watch the Jews in the movie becoming pets. Schindler appears to be attached to them as if they were so many turtles; again, I am reminded of the children dressing up ET in their mother's clothes, or carrying him around on their bicycles. God bless Oskar Schindler for protecting the Schindlerjuden, whatever his motives; but there are times in the movie when he appears to think of them as if they were so much property.

There are no tough moral choices in the movie. Schindler does not agonize, or even lose a night of sleep like Jean Valjean, before risking himself; there are no Sophie's Choices in the movie; when he sets his Jews to work making munitions, we are told he is sabotaging the munitions, so that they cannot blow anyone up; and when the Jews walk over the hill at the end, they are walking not into the strife-torn Israel of today, but into a golden fantasy Jewish state.