David Thomson's take on Schindler's List in his massive collection of mini-reviews Have You Seen…? contains a line that has stuck with me and subtly shifted how I see Steven Spielberg's epic tale of the Holocaust. Thomson is mostly admiring, until we get to this:
But then, alas, some clerical fussiness flags that little girl's coat in red,* so we will not miss it. That small touch exposed the uncrushable chutzpah of the most accomplished and "mature" filmmaker in America in 1992. With that one arty nudge Spielberg assigned his sense of his own past to the collected memories of all the films he had seen. All of a sudden, the drab Krakow vista became a set, with assistant directors urging the extras into line. … In that one small tarting up (not nearly enough to...