Defiance

Posted on: 13th January 2009  |

Director: Edward Zwick
Starring: Daniel Craig, Jamie Bell, Live Schreiber
UK Release date: 9 January 2009
Certificate: 15 (137 mins)

For all the heroism of its story, Defiance is an uninvolving film. That it should end up so is somewhat of an insult to the memory of those whose lives it depicts: the members of the Bielski partisans, Jews from East Poland who fought against the Nazis by surviving in the forests between 1941-1944. Led by the Bielski brothers Tuvia, Alexander Zisel (“Zus”) and Asael, they protected over 1000 Jews from persecution, setting up in their forest bunkers a village with doctors, a mill, metalworkers – enough to survive and to carry out guerrilla raids against the German army. Despite the strength of this story, what we are presented with in Defiance is an over-long and clumsy film.

Daniel Craig plays Tuvia Bielski, turned by the film into the moral hero of the story. His character is meant to encapsulate the challenge of remaining human in such an environment: should he attack the Germans and gain revenge, or protect the increasing number of Jews fleeing from the ghettos? Despite his initial killing of collaborators he comes to represent the choice of survival; his brother, Zus, frustrated at what he sees as passivity, joins the Russian forces to fight. It’s a rather blunt portrayal of the dilemma – at one point a wedding held in Tuvia’s forest camp is blended with scenes of an enraged Zus attacking a German tank – and it’s hard to believe the real brothers would have seen things in such simplistic terms.

In terms of what we see, the violence of survival is portrayed as well as it could be on film – the winter, Zus’s self-inflicted wounds on hearing of his wife’s death, the ravages of illness – but the emotions never really escape their Hollywood medium. Moods are cleanly juxtaposed with one another: a death followed by a birth; huddled families in a frozen hut and then springtime fills the screen with light; warm strings bloom in the soundtrack and leaves make their way down the river … We’ve seen all this before, in countless other films. The memory of the people who survived and fought has been caught up in just another war film.

Watching it left me with the wish that it had been a documentary. The decision had been taken somewhere during production to have the partisans speak in accented English, with German and Polish subtitled when necessary. The result isn’t just illogical but is unwittingly dreadful at times: Craig’s accent, which stood out as the worst perhaps only because he spoke the most lines, clothes one vowel in “East European” and the next in Bond-style English. There’s no way to trick yourself that you aren’t watching an action hero act in a film. A film has the advantage over a documentary of narrative and mood to involve its audience more closely; by not taking advantage of this there doesn’t seem much point in yet another World War II film (we are in the midst of a spate of them: The Reader, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, Valkyrie), even if the material itself is exceptional. Why not make a documentary of the Bielskis? One answer is that it’s already been made (A History Channel production in 2007), and the other is the obvious financial reason, the same reason that Daniel Craig/James Bond with a gun is the publicity photograph.

It’s sad too that the film will most likely become the most famous memento of the events of that period. That could be spun as a positive – that more people than not will know about what happened – but it’s a sad and grubby positive to emerge from such a heroic story.



Nathan Koblintz



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