I recently saw "Searching for Bobby Fischer," and it seemed to me that it
managed to capture a good deal of what we saw in Zallian's filmscript for
"Schindler's List."
    The complexity of character was what attracted me.  The two men--Larry
Fishburne and Ben Kingsley were fighting for control over the kid's talent.
Mantegna's great speech to the boy's teacher let Mantegna capture the magic
of his acting and caught the interplay between his pride, his confusion, and
his ambition for his son (with not a little bit of hubris on his part).
    When Joan Allen kicks Kingsley out of the house, cheers went up in my
household.  Somehow, Zaillian seems  to understand the mothering side of
feminism, and  how many scriptwriters can you say that about?
    And in the end the generosity of allowing the boy to appropriate all
that he needs of everyone in the final match of the film reminded me that
Zaillian put all those words in Schindler's farewell speech (which I thought
was the only bathetic part of the movie), and  in his own hands, he denied
explaining it all.
    I think scriptwriting is one of the undervalued side of films among us
teachers and critics, and I think that it is Zaillian's strength, whether he
moves into directing or not.
 
                Gerald Forshey
                Professor of Humanities
                Daley College
                City Colleges of Chicago       [log in to unmask]