For the movie, unlike real life or the novel, the answer is simpler. In a German interview, Spielberg explained why Schindler did it: he was "ein guter Mensch" (Niven). In translation, he did it because he was "a good man," but the translation into Hollywood parlance could be that he did it because "a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do." This answer is not as flippant as it first sounds. Once he became a character in a Hollywood film, Schindler became the product of the interaction of Hollywood conventions with his own accomplishments. Reviewer Richard Schickel has recognized Spielberg's Schindler as a familiar kind of hero: "he was finally that classically empathetic, inspirational figure, the lone individual doing good in a desperately dangerous context" (Schickel). Other reviewers compare him to the Scarlet Pimpernal, to Rick Blain from Casablanca (Thomson), and to Rhett Butler (Sharret). Thus he joins a particular group of our culture's heroes: trickster figures and loveable scoundrels. These characters establish their heroic status by achieving their individual tasks. So the old Hollywood cliche amounts to saying that to be a hero (a "man"), one must behave heroically. Schindler acts as he does because he is the hero of the story.
Schindler acts. Drama has a traditional fondness for portraying actors, both in Hollywood (Thomson) and in drama of earlier ages. Seneca's Atreus is an actor of the first magnitude. Upon seeing his brother Thyestes for the first time in the play, Atreus' anger springs up. He compares it to a dog straining at its leash and concludes:
cum sperat ira sanguinem, nescit tegi; tamen tegatur. (Seneca, Thyestes 504-505) when fury hopes for blood, it does not know how to be concealed; nevertheless, let it be concealed.
when fury hopes for blood, it does not know how to be concealed; nevertheless, let it be concealed.
[H]e was an (occasionally unscrupulous) opportunist, profiteer and black-marketeer, he enjoyed luxury, was a near-alcoholic and a rampant womanizer who disregarded his wife's feelings and welfare. Schindler seemed inherently ambivalent. (Niven)
Regarding the acting at least, Senecan ethics makes it not only acceptable but almost mandatory. The hero greets the world with a stoic mask. The wise leader will not allow anger to cloud his judgement. Even though he may at times have to spur the masses to anger, he will do so better by "playing the angry man well" (iratum bene agentes) than by truly becoming angry (Seneca, De Ira 2. 17. 1). Seneca frequently talks about the need for controlling the effects of anger on one's behavior; one then can control the anger itself (Seneca, De Ira 3. 13. 1).
Seneca demonstrates the possibility of controlling anger by citing examples of people who have done so. Socrates, considered a model by stoics, struggled to conceal his anger (3. 13. 3-7). Seneca recounts the story of Caligula and Pastor, a Roman equestrian. Caligula killed Pastor's son one day and invited Pastor to dine with him that night. Worried lest Caligula kill his other son, Pastor went and masked his emotion, even though when he drank the wine, it was "no different than if he were drinking his son's blood" (non aliter quam si fili sanguinem biberet; De Ira 2. 32. 2-6). Seneca also relates that the king of Persia killed Harpagus' children and fed them to him in a banquet. After being informed of what had happened and asked what he thought of such a meal, Harpagus responded, "With the king, every meal is delightful" (Apud regem . . . omnis cena iucunda est. Seneca, De Ira 3. 15. 1-3). Seneca also tells of another father, Praexaspes, who advised his friend the king, Cambyses, to cut down on his drinking. Cambyses demonstrated his tolerance for alcohol by getting drunk and shooting the Praexaspes' son through the heart. Cambyses asked Praexaspes what he thought of the his marksmanship; Praexaspes replied that "Apollo himself would have been unable to shoot more accurately" (At ille negavit Apollinem potuisse certius mittere; De Ira 3. 14. 1-4). Even Seneca finally grows angry (or at least acts angry) with such a toady ("May the gods damn him!" Dii illum . . . perdant; 3. 14. 3), not because he was playing a role, but because he was playing the wrong one. To be an honorable man, one must act like an honorable man. At this point, we are close to the Hollywood cliche, "A man's gotta do . . . ." Seneca asserts the fathers should have taken the honorable way out and committed suicide (3. 15. 3-4). For the stoic, suicide was the role of a lifetime, a chance to reenact the death of Socrates and become a martyr for a good cause (Rosenmeyer 47). Thus the issue is not that one plays a part, but what part one plays, and Schindler plays the part of the hero.
The mode of Schindler's heroism in the movie is intriguing. Fogel has noted that the kinds of changes that Spielberg made to Keneally's book on Schindler follow a pattern. Spielberg removes some of Schindler's heroic activities that occur early in the book; he also removes some of the blemishes that occur later (Fogel). These changes are to some degree dictated by the narrative expectations of the mass audience. The changes bring Schindler's character into alignment with the monomythic hero as defined by Jewett and Lawrence: "a selfless superhero emerges to renounce temptations and carry out the redemptive task" (xx). The film becomes a tale of two salvations: that of the Schindlerjuden and that of Schindler himself.
A stranger arrives in town. Spielberg employs this familiar motif just after showing the harmonious community coming under the Nazi threat. Spielberg shows Schindler attending a glitzy night club and wooing the Nazi officers there. By the time the highest-ranking officer arrives and asks who the stranger is, the maŚtre d' responds with a tone usually reserved for celebrities, "Why, that's Oskar Schindler." The historical Schindler apparently had a similar charismatic quality and attended his share of such parties (figure 10).
Keneally opens his book with a different scene, following the tradition of beginning in medias res. As in the movie, Schindler is going to a party in his fancy suit. Both sources draw attention to the Nazi pin on his lapel. But Keneally sends Schindler off to a different party, one at Amon Goeth's villa at the Plasz˘w work camp. He removes Schindler's mask in the midst of this opening scene, first by describing the loathing Schindler felt toward Goeth and then by following Schindler as he descends to the cellar to comfort Helen Hirsch and promise a deliverance that seems impossible for him to supply (Keneally 13-30). Some of his movie star mystique endures even in Helen's dark underworld, in an exchange that ironically serves as the source of the maître d's exclamation:
"Don't you know me? he asked, just like a man a football star or a violinist whose sense of his own celebrity has been hurt by a stranger's failure to recognize him. "I'm Schindler." (Keneally 27)
Neeson has hollow panache, a flat sexy look, a connoisseur's calm, untidy emotionalism with no core, and that spacious face waiting for our guess at what he is thinking. He's all seduction. Spielberg loves the mystery in Neeson's Schindler. (Thomson)
Spielberg filters out other indications of Spielberg's heroic character that emerge in the opening pages of the book. For example, the movie has Schindler callowly move into an "aryanized" apartment, that is, an apartment stolen from Jews to be given to Germans. In the book, Keneally reports that he seems to have paid that family for the apartment (51). He definitely warned Jews about an upcoming pogrom early in the occupation (56). In the movie, he at first takes Jewish laborers because they are cheaper than Polish labor; in the book, he takes Jewish laborers as a favor to Stern (72). He also risked his life to pass information of the systematic oppression of Jews to the outside world (148- 150).
The book presents Schindler as a man of consistent inconsistencies; his virtues and vices interact throughout his life. Spielberg's editing of events creates a man who changes much more through the course of events. Schindler's observation of the liquidation of the ghetto is in the book; even the girl in the red outfit is in the book (127-133). For Schindler, this moment is one of metanoia, of a change of heart and mind, even in the book. "I was now resolved to do everything in my power to defeat the system" (133). But by eliminating other such moments, the movie enhances this as the moment of metanoia for Schindler.
After this point in the movie, the salvation of Schindler and the Schindlerjuden follow parallel courses. A notorious womanizer, Schindler and his wife lived separately while he was in Poland. When she comes to visit early in the movie, she soon leaves because he will not promise that no maŚtre d' will mistake her for one of his mistresses again. When he finally gets the Schindlerjuden safely moved to his home town of Brinnlitz, Czechoslovakia, he approaches is wife to reconcile with her. He now makes the promise he could not make earlier. Spielberg leaves nothing to chance in letting the audience know of Schindler's conversion, that he has "renounce[d] temptations" so he can "carry out the redemptive task" (Jewett and Lawrence xx). Schindler accordingly finds his devout wife in church and makes his dramatic promise just as the congregation has intoned, "Et dimitte nobis debita nostra sicut et nos demittimus debitoribus nostris" ("And forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors").
This reconciliation is pure Spielberg; the Schindlers did reunite in Brinnlitz, but that did not stop Schindler's womanizing, such as his skinny dipping with an SS Fraulein in the camp's water tank (Keneally 335). Spielberg omits this scene for obvious reasons. In Casablanca, for instance, Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) sleeps with Ilsa Lund Laszlo (Ingrid Bergman), the wife of anti- Nazi hero Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid). The audience accepts this because in the end, Blaine is willing to sacrifice himself to see that the Laszlo's escape safely, redeeming himself in the process of saving them. Spielberg also presents a redeemed hero. He gives us a contrite and broken Schindler at the end of the war, his salvation as well as that of the Jews complete. He prepares to leave the camp and to "recede into obscurity" (Jewett and Lawrence xx), that is, to "ride off into the sunset." He breaks down and cries when the Schindlerjuden give him a ring made from a volunteer's filling, in what I have come to think of as the bathos scene. In a outburst that is a dramatic failure but a narrative necessity (the mask must come off at last so we can know what lies underneath), Neeson weeps over those he could have saved had he not been so prodigal.
In the end, this Schindler sacrifices his all to be good, even to the point of a breakdown scene that is beyond Neeson and which is the most pointed failure in the picture. How much truer it might have been if this Schindler had stayed matter-of-fact and jovial to the end, laughing off the chance of friendship with Stern (for, really, Stern isn't his type) and recollecting - as a rough joke - that the getaway car might have meant another handful of lives. But Spielberg won't permit that brusqueness with his big finish in bight. So Schindler becomes, simply, a ruined but saved man, a character such as Capra might have liked. He is driven away a wreck as much as a hero. (Thomson)
How much truer it might have been if this Schindler had stayed matter-of-fact and jovial to the end, laughing off the chance of friendship with Stern (for, really, Stern isn't his type) and recollecting - as a rough joke - that the getaway car might have meant another handful of lives. But Spielberg won't permit that brusqueness with his big finish in bight. So Schindler becomes, simply, a ruined but saved man, a character such as Capra might have liked. He is driven away a wreck as much as a hero. (Thomson)