Adapted from the novel Schindler's Ark (aka Schindler's List) by Thomas Keneally
Oskar Schindler uses money, charisma, and influence over fellow Nazis to save 1,200 Jewish people from the Holocaust.
This book is considered a novel, but it's practically non-fiction. While it generally follows the narrative structure of a novel, it consists mainly of anecdotes that were related to the author by survivors. Keneally is quick to point out when different people's stories conflict, and often omits quotation marks from conversations to illustrate that no one really knows or remembers exactly what was said. When compared with the movie, the book seems even less like a novel, as the movie shows a much clearer picture of Schindler's character journey, while the book keeps his motives more ambiguous, since no one can be quite sure exactly what he was thinking when. Thus, the film feels more like a novel than the book does.
Many of the more powerful stories from the book are incorporated into the movie, although often the order and the details were changed. Sometimes, several similar incidents were combined into one, or things that happened to a couple different people were shown all happening to the same person, to make the story more concise. For the most part, what happened to the Jewish people was, while not exactly the same, quite consistent. The biggest changes were in the Nazis, especially Schindler and Amon Goeth. The beginning of the movie makes it seem like Schindler didn't particularly care what happened to the Jews as long as he was making money, which helps his speech at the end about how he wished he had sold more of his stuff so he could have saved more people become even more moving and powerful. In the book, he doesn't even make that speech at the end, and it seemed like he came around to the idea of trying to save lives much sooner. The movie attributes most of the earlier work to Itzhak Stern, whereas the book made it seem like Schindler was involved in decisions that the film showed him unhappy about. Also, according to the book, Schindler was arrested and imprisoned several times during the war, while the film only shows this happening once. While this was probably to keep the movie from becoming even longer, multiple arrests helped demonstrate just how much he was risking in a way that the film doesn't convey quite as clearly. In the same way that the movie reduces Schindler's arrests, it doesn't show that Amon Goeth was imprisoned by the SS before the end of the war, which I thought was very interesting. There's also a whole thing in the movie about Schindler telling Goeth that he would be more powerful if he pardoned prisoners and Goeth trying it for about a day, which I don't remember from the book.
If you've only seen the movie, I would recommend reading the book, because it includes several moving episodes, particularly at Brinnlitz toward the end of the war, that the movie kind of skips. However, I don't think the movie could have adapted the book much better. I've always thought showing the color of the little girl's coat in red while the rest of the movie was black and white was very powerful, but I wasn't expecting that girl, and the fact that she loved the color red, to feature so prominently in the book. After having read that, the use of that one color in the film seems more than just a beautiful touch to the film; it seems like it would have been wrong if they hadn't done it that way. I also noticed several other small details that I hadn't remembered from the movie, since they were described more thoroughly in the book. That's actually something I've noticed in several other cases during this project when I'd seen the movie before but never read the book. I'll be reading and think, This wasn't in the movie, and then I'll watch it and see that it actually was, just much more subtly than the book. So while I was a little disappointed when I realized just how many Best Adapted Screenplay winners I'd already blogged about, in a way I'm glad that I was already somewhat familiar with many of these stories.
Speaking of which, the next winner is yet another Best Picture Winner, Forrest Gump, based on the novel by Winston Groom. But after that will be six movies in a row that I haven't blogged about before, which is the longest such stretch so far.
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