I watched Schindler's list for the first time over the weekend (and into the week...and for what seemed like an eternity. Not the duration optimized for busy parents watching in the space between the kids bedtime and our inevitable decline into exhausted stupor). It was of course great. I'm probably the last person on the earth to have seen it, so I'm certainly not going to sing it's praises like they're new.
What stuck with me most coming out of the experience is the way it hasn't stuck with me. At least not the way a book would. Yes, the treatment by the Nazi's was horrible. Yes, the emaciated, frail bodies of the Polish Jews were sickening. Yes, the exploitation of slave labor and breaking apart of families was deplorable. And yet...
None of it stuck with me. A few days later I don't feel like I'm still carrying the weight of their burden. And here's why that's interesting; after reading about the same events I did.
The detail described in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich was so thorough, so precise, and so vivid that it sickened me for days. The characters I connected to in Herman Wouk's War and Remembrance were so full of life and strength, and I watched them wither away in body and spirit over the course of a thousand pages. There were times while reading and after that I felt physically ill for them.
The point is that as great a job as Steven Spielberg did on that movie (not to mention Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley, and the rest of the cast, including the inexplicably thin extras) there is no way to capture the true depth and breath, both in scope and character, of that event in a movie. Even if it is three hours.
Books connect in ways that film cannot. Sure, a picture is worth a thousand words. But how about a couple hundred thousand? Long live the written word! Now...if we could just get more people to read.
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Note: the one area that the movie succeed in a way that a book couldn't was the final scene wherein a procession of descendants from the Jews that Oskar Schindler saved made their way to his tomb and paid their respects. Seeing the sheer number of people who are in the world today because of him was much more powerful than reading a number (6,000).
Final Note: Yes, I know I'm missing the most obvious book to movie comparison - the book Schindler's List. So shoot me, I haven't had time to read it.
