Directed By: Edward Zwick
Measured up against his other war movies, Glory and The Last Samurai, or even his 2006 effort, Blood Diamond, Edward Zwick’s latest film, Defiance, is not up to his usual standard. The mix of action and drama, plot and character, just isn’t there.
The weight of history can obscure and compromise a historical narrative, especially with such a controversial subject as the Holocaust. Defiance is a bit of a bland movie with several historical inaccuracies and factual liberties. But this isn't the history channel, and holding films accountable for not retelling historical truth is a discussion for another time. The acting, although Daniel Craig has generated some Oscar buzz for his role as Tuvia Bielski, is what the Times critic Richard Corliss called “generic.” (Times Review) However, there are some good scenes between the brothers, Tuvia (Daniel Craig) and Zus (Liev Schreiber). But the actors couldn’t overcome a repetitive story structure and the missed chances of character developing scenes that would have given this film a real leg to stand on.
Reported on January 12th, on www.wenn.com, the Jewish Partisan Educational Foundation has developed the website www.jewishpartisans.org as an incentive for New York City schools to teach the movie in online
curriculums. And as a historical document, this film is worthy. But it needs to be taught alongside the novel on which it is based, Defiance: The Bielski Partisans, by Nechama Tec, to flush out the historical and factual inaccuracies for which it has warranted criticism. This is not Schindler’s List, nor The Pianist. But Zwick intentionally made the film because it wasn’t. He wanted a film about Jews fighting the Germans, not being victims. And there are plenty of good action sequences to show that he made just that film. In this respect, it is unique among Hollywood Holocaust films.
The four Bielski brothers, Tuvia, Zus, Asael (Jamie Bell) and Aron (George MacKay), Polish Jews, escape into the
Belorussian forest after local German SS officers murder their family. After they encounter other Jewish refugees in the forest, they decide to help protect them and fight the German occupation. The film covers the first year of the community’s survival. In the end, after three years surviving in the forest, the brothers help save nearly 1,200 lives.
But after a promising and bloody start to the film, it starts to drag. As more refuges join the Bielski brothers in the forest for escape and protection, the focus shifts from the struggle between Tuvia and Zus, to the greater challenge of building and maintaining a forest encampment while being hunted by German soldiers. If this was a documentary on a proto-civilization and how they dealt with all of the challenges the first humans must have faced when they began to change to an agricultural society from a hunter-gatherer way of life, then money well spent. But it isn’t. It’s a $50 million WWII film.
Tuvia and Zus have an almost fatal fight over how the encampment should be managed and protected. Tuvia is for diplomacy and Zus is for a military state. Zus decides to leave and join with Soviet Partisans to fight the Nazis. Tuvia stays and looks after the camp. At this point the narrative shifts and becomes more about Tuvia and his struggle to lead the community. But as the audience, we don’t care, because we have invested our emotions in Zus as well. And Zus disappears from the film several times, as he is busy fighting with the Soviet Partisans. When he reappears, you have almost forgotten about him. Zwick missed the chance to explore and exploit the themes of the war and the Jewish plight by not developing the internal struggles of his protagonists.
And these two moments really cheapened the whole movie for me. When Zus and a raiding party return to the camp with food for the refugees and a horse, Tuvia decides to mount the horse and deliver a motivational speech, ala Brave Heart. And three quarters of the way through the film, as German Stuka bombers devastate the camp and a bomb bursts through a make-shift shelter, killing many people, Tuvia’s ears ring and the sound becomes muted, as everything in front of him is reduced to slow motion destruction, ala Saving Private Ryan. Oh, and if miss these moments, the music should help you find them; here’s a clue, it gets loud.
Ultimately, Edward Zwick, who co-wrote the screenplay with Clayton Frohman, let the core that made this story compelling, the relationship between the brothers and their struggle to define their lives as refugees, partisans and protectors, become obscured and he fell back on letting the weight of history and the score of James Howard Newton to prop up his film.
