Get ready to hear a lot of talk this awards season about how baffling it is that Ralph Fiennes only has two Oscar nominations to his name, with his expected Best Actor nomination for Conclave on the horizon. Despite his continuing to give us indelible characters like M. Gustave, Chef Slowik, and lego Alfred Pennyworth, he’s received barely any notable accolades. His best chance at winning an Oscar was when he was nominated for Best Supporting Actor for playing Amon Göth in Schindler’s List, a fresh face immortalized as one of the great villains in World War II cinema history. But, alas, he lost to Tommy Lee Jones for The Fugitive, a loss that has increasingly looked more egregious the longer time has gone on.
Who Is Ralph Fiennes’ Amon Göth in ‘Schindler’s List’?

Image via Universal Pictures

Amon Göth is a high ranking Nazi lieutenant who’s in charge of a concentration camp that will prove essential to Oskar Schindler’s (Liam Neeson) plan to help Jews escape the Holocaust. In order to get Jews to be a part of his factory that he will use as a conduit for their escape, Schindler will have to gladhand Göth and butter him up with bribes and social status. Even for somebody like Oskar, who’s learned how to easily operate among Nazi authority figures, having to rub shoulders with Göth is an unpleasant proposition, to be sure. Göth is repeatedly shown to be an unctuous individual, even by the warped culture in which he operates, and the ways in which Fiennes manifests that inherent unlikeability are what make his performance so special. Rather than hone in on the overarching evil that he personifies, Fiennes focuses on the more mundane proclivities that make up his core identity that make him skin-crawling for how utterly… normal it is.
Ralph Fiennes Makes Göth Insecure and Pathetic

In spite of him appearing to have stepped right off a Nazi propaganda poster, Göth’s villainy is much pettier and vindictive than you’d expect. Far from being identified primarily by his ideology, he’s instead drawn mostly by the countless ways he prioritizes his personal comfort and security above all else. He’s a bureaucratic hedonist who seeks momentary satisfaction, with a rigid attention to keeping up appearances and climbing his way up the social ladder. He fires on random Jews in his camp because he’s bored. He resents Schindler for his social connections and boundless charisma, privately hating him in an aspirational manner. He harbors a kind of base affection for his Jewish servant, Helen (Embeth Davidtz), but is clearly appalled at his own desire. He can’t go a few minutes without primping his hair or checking for dirt under his fingernails. If you could summarize the secret ingredient to Fiennes’ performance down to one word, it’s: insecurity.

Far from the all-powerful stooge that Steven Spielberg previously depicted Nazis as being in his Indiana Jones films, Fiennes gets closer to the heart of the banality of evil that defined the Nazi regime. There is nothing powerful, or extraordinary, or even particularly interesting, about Göth’s existence or presence. Even when trying to assert his authority, he can’t help but whine about how cold he is or show how embarrassed he is when something goes wrong in front of his underlings.

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Fiennes’ performance borders on the uncanny due not to any sense of terror or intimidation, but from how he encapsulates the crippling insecurity that fascism feeds off of. It exposes the facade that fascism must project in order to pose any threat, as Göth is repeatedly shown to only have any real power because of the position he holds. There’s an argument to be made that this is still the hardest role of Fiennes’ whole career, as he must be captivating without being charismatic, vulnerable without being humane, scary without being grotesque. It’s exemplary work, not because he’s so imposing, but because he’s so… ordinary.
Ralph Fiennes Had a Much More Daunting Task Than Tommy Lee Jones

Image via Warner Bros.

It must be stated, on paper, it makes sense why Jones would win over Fiennes. Jones was a beloved industry veteran who’d recently lost Supporting Actor for JFK, while Fiennes was a relative unknown. Jones’ role was effortlessly entertaining and essentially allowed to steal the show, while Fiennes’ role is a challenge to engage with and remains firmly in the realm of truly “supporting.” But, when looking back, removed from any awards season machinations, Ralph Fiennes’ work feels far more dynamic, far more penetrating, far more dangerous in its proximity to an uncomfortable truth. Short of Bruno Ganz’s ferocious portrayal of Adolf Hitler in Downfall, Fiennes gave arguably the most definitive, most closely detailed portrayal of history’s greatest cartoon villain we’re yet to see, and he came out unrewarded for that. That is really cruel.
Schindler’s List is available to watch on Prime Video in the U.S.
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In German-occupied Poland during World War II, industrialist Oskar Schindler gradually becomes concerned for his Jewish workforce after witnessing their persecution by the Nazis.

Release Date

December 15, 1993

Runtime

195 minutes

Main Genre

Biography