One must have a heart of stone to watch Schindler's List without crying; but it is also a part of Steven Spielberg's achievement to have fulfilled every director's dream, which is to make a film that will bring about a collapse of criticism. All the adulation somewhat astonishes me. What is at stake, it begins to seem, is the honor of Hollywood. Here is a big and grim movie about the biggest and grimmest subject, and its final frame says “For Steve Ross.” Gravity has made peace with the grosses. Of course, gravity in Hollywood is a random force: a few years ago the American people were instructed with moral and visual eloquence that Lyndon B. Johnson conspired to murder John F. Kennedy. So we have a little luck to be thankful for. This time the subject was right for the eloquence.

But there is a sense in which the American people was owed this film. For no figure in American culture has worked harder to stupefy it, to stuff it with illusion, to deny the reality of evil, to blur the distinction between fantasy and fact, and to preach the child's view of the world than Steven Spielberg. In the years when filmmakers and poets and novelists and painters and composers were wrestling with the possibility, or the impossibility, of treating radical evil in art, Spielberg was teaching actors to sculpt mountains out of mashed potatoes in anticipation of their redemption by cuddly visitors from another planet. Oh, it was well done, and it was enchanting. But the inverse proportion between the maturity of the technology and the maturity of the worldview was so great that finally Spielberg's work came to seem like a genial cynicism, which is Hollywood's cynicism of choice.

Now the critics, almost every one of them, are demanding that we celebrate this man's late passage into adulthood as a turning point in the culture. They say that he has made a “masterpiece.” Does none of them see how hale and self-regarding Schindler's List is? Its renunciation of color is adduced as a sign of its stringency; but the black and white of this film is riper than most color. (The Ghetto of Madame de …, I thought during its first hour.) The glints and the gleams are smart. The edges of the frame are faded. (The film is designed to look like a restored print of itself.) The shadows are exquisite. The darkness of this film about darkness, in sum, is gorgeous. And its gorgeousness gives it away. For it is a sign that Spielberg has not grasped his material, that the old relation between skill and understanding still obtains.

I refer not merely to the film's mistakes. (Its Jewish mistakes are the most annoying ones: when they enter the ghetto, for example, the Jews of Kraków greet each other in Israeli Hebrew.) I refer, rather, to the complete absence from this film of any humility before its subject. This is not material, after all, that is easily mastered. Traces of difficulty, therefore, are signs of seriousness. But there are no traces of difficulty in Schindler's List. Very robustly Spielberg just barrels through. His camera confidently follows naked Jewish women right through the door of the “showers” at Auschwitz, which turn out to be, in this case, showers. This sadistic trick was played on a cousin of mine, who walked into, and then out of, the gas chamber at Auschwitz. I have reflected a long time on her experience, and I must say that there is a point beyond which my mind has failed to follow her. The point is the door.

The power of realism in art is owed to the continuity between the world which it makes and the world in which, and for which, it is made. For this reason, the realistic depiction of radical evil must end, if it is to stay honest, where the continuity ends. The smooth segue of Spielberg's camera from life outside the door of the gas chamber to life inside the door of the gas chamber shows that no discontinuity has been observed. No limit has been met. No rupture has reared itself. The mind of the movie-maker has not hit a bump. But there is a more egregious example of Spielberg's inausterity, of his misplaced David Leanism. In 1944, as the Red Army approached, the commandant of the concentration camp at Plaszow was ordered to open the mass graves and exhume the bodies of the thousands of Jews who were murdered during the liquidation of the ghetto in Kraków in 1943 (the liquidation of the ghetto is the most unforgettable passage in Spielberg's film) and to burn the bodies in pits. Anybody who has seen photographs or films of these fiery, open-air charnels knows that the camera has probably never recorded a sight more obscene. But here was a director, and wardrobe and makeup, poring over the tone of charred flesh, the hollowing of rotted skulls, the disposition of mangled bones, to get it right. What on earth did they think they were doing? Do they really think that they got it right?

The scene is chilling, but the scene is a facsimile; and so the greater the verisimilitude, the lesser the verisimilitude. There are facsimiles that are chilling merely for having been made. Schindler's List proves again that, for Spielberg, there is a power in the world that is greater than good and greater than evil, and it is the movies. He is hardly alone in this cineaste's theodicy. Thus, a few weeks after the film opened, a good and learned friend of mine remarked that it opened not a moment too soon, with “Holocaust revisionism” loose in the land. I retorted that it is wrong and abject to believe that the Holocaust needs “proving,” even if The New Yorker recently published an essay, bizarrely called “Evidence of Evil,” and more bizarrely called, on the magazine's cover, “Bringing Auschwitz Back to Life,” in which it acclaimed the discovery by a penitent Holocaust revisionist in France of the “one single proof” that an impenitent Holocaust revisionist in France had demanded. The discussion about “Holocaust revisionism” is not a “debate” between a “view” that it happened and a “view” that it did not happen; it is a war between a truth and a disease. More to the point, Spielberg's movie does not “prove” a thing, since it is only a movie. In the matter of the Holocaust, too, Hollywood must not be mistaken for history. It will be a good thing if Schindler's List brings down the number of Americans who wonder whether the Holocaust really happened, but it will not be a great thing.

I do not doubt that the glibness of Spielberg's film (though there is nothing glib about Ben Kingsley's or Ralph Fiennes's performance) is glibness in a good cause. But Americans are quickly moved. There is something a little exhilarating about all these tears. I'd prefer a bit more stunning into silence. Americans escape easily from reality and they are not easily returned to it; and Schindler's List dispatches them in both directions. It transports its audience to the basest moment in history and calls it a wrap.