Director: Edward Zwick
Starring: Daniel Craig, Live Schreiber & Jamie Bell
A decent WWII period drama about a group of Jewish brothers who protected Jewish refugees from German soldiers in Eastern Poland.
As the plot might suggest, Defiance is a serious film and its director, Edward Zwick, is a man well-known for making serious films with messages promoting fighting for worthy cause. Defiance certainly does not disappoint these expectations. Beginning in 1941 Poland, Defiance tells the story, based on actual events, of the Bielski brothers: Tuvia (Daniel Craig), Zus (Liev Schreiber), Asael (Jamie Bell) and Aron (George MacKay). When German forces invading Poland began rounding up the Jewish population to place in ghettos and concentration camps, the Bielski brothers went into hiding within the forests of Eastern Poland/Western Belarus where, upon finding other Jews fleeing capture built a community and fought German forces to protect it.
Defiance manages to tell its story fairly well. There is plenty of tension between the brothers to be told, particular between Tuvia and Zus, the latter of which leaves the community to fight German’s more directly as part of a Russian force which leaves Tuvia to lead, reluctantly, the remaining survivors and protect them from attacks, starvation, disease and the winter. Frequently though, the seriousness of the situation these survivors have to face, threatens to overwhelm the atmosphere of the film with despair and there is very little hope. Even a wedding is no cause for celebration as the scene is inter-cut with scenes of Zus involved in a Russian attack on a German squadron (the manner of which recalls a similar, more effectively managed, sequence from The Godfather) and a birth in the camp comes with the reminder of the circumstances that allowed it, the rape of a Jewish woman by a German soldier. An overlong middle section involves frequent scenes of people suffering from illness, starvation and the cold as all-too-frequent reminders that these are serious events. Fortunately there are more effective scenes within Defiance as, in addition to scenes dealing directly with each of the Bielski brother’s reactions to events, the presence of two, self-described, “intellectuals” allows for moments where they debate their purpose, how they should proceed to survive and the pros and cons of armed combat. While not subtle, these moments serve to provoke the consideration of the audience as much as the characters on events.
Performances in Defiance are also decent and also very serious. Playing their roles deadly-straight, Craig, Schreiber and Bell play the three older Bielski brothers fairly well though the performances are somewhat distracted by the actors attempts at speaking in Eastern European accents. All three actors are very capable of showing anger, pain and displaying moments of deep thought over their actions both recent and forthcoming though little hints at any deeper personality is seen outside of Bell’s interaction with the woman whom he later marries. The female cast get to display a wider range of emotions though their roles are limited to those of love interests to the Bielski brothers.
Defiance is most watchable though when its characters are involved in combat. A veteran of filming combat with films such as Glory and The Last Samurai, Zwick handles the combat sequences very well in Defiance. While battles in Defiance are smaller in scale to those of his other films, Zwick is still able to choreograph effective action conveying danger and thrills and even with occasional moments of visual inventiveness such as an assault on a Police Station when the Bielski brothers seek medical supplies where the action is filmed in staggered motion with blurs of action and the film’s finale involving an air raid and infantry assault on the Bielski camp that forces the group out of the woods, through swampland to another confrontation with soldiers is similarly well-executed.
Overall, Defiance, while managing to convey an adequate sense of the struggle the Bielski brothers and the people they saved had to endure, the film is overlong with too many heavy-handed sequences threatening to overpower the story with their seriousness and, while possessing some good battle sequences, is also told in so traditional a manner that there a frequent moments where the executions feels all too familiar including a speech made by Tuvia (Craig) on horseback that feels too derivative of Braveheart to fully rouse feeling. A decent film, but little more.
Rating: 3/5
