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DefianceBy and large Second World War movies are defined by the presence of fatigues-clad GIs and Tommies engaged in stand-up battles with the villainous Wehrmacht. And when cinema focuses on the Jews, the emphasis will generally be on subjugation and the camps. Defiance is doubly refreshing. Not only does director-producer-co-screenwriter Edward Zwick (Blood Diamond, The Last Samurai) take us into an area of the conflict little seen in movies - the forests of Belarus - it also features Jewish partisans as its heroes.
The opening credits state simply "A true story" - which is accurate, but only insofar as Hollywood movies 'based on reality' ever stick to the facts, which are here gleaned from the book 'Defiance: The Bielski Partisans' by Nechama Tec. Director Zwick, who has made a career out of producing epic yet thoughtful war movies (Glory about the American Civil War and Courage Under Fire with its conflicting accounts of the Gulf War) is very much the man to bring it to the screen. The result is a good, solid war film in which the Jewish protagonists face the overwhelming horror of Nazi policy during the German military expansion in the first years of the war.
It's 1941, and the Nazis sweep into Belarus, murdering and rounding up tens of thousands of Jews. Among those murdered are the parents of the Bielski brothers Zus (Liev Schreiber), Asael (Jamie Bell) and the younger Aron (George Mackay), who escape into the vast, dense forests near their family farm and meet up with their eldest brother Tuvia (Daniel Craig).
While wandering through the woods Aron chances upon open mass graves and devastated locals, who follow him back to the brothers' camp. Little by little, more refugees join the brothers and their camp becomes a small village. Their own teacher reminds them, "The Talmud says, if you save a life, you are responsible for it." But Zus comes into conflict with Tuvia over this. Although Tuvia took revenge on the collaborating policeman responsible for their parents' deaths, he is less inclined to become a combatant than Zus.
"This is the one place in the whole of Belarus where a Jew can be free," argues Tuvia, who, above all, wants to care for the community. Zus just wants "blood for blood". The two argue and Zus leaves to join the local Red Army partisan group.
In reality some of the Belarusians survived in the forest for up to three years, but Zwick is concerned with the drama that surrounds the setting up of Tuvia as a reluctant Moses figure, holding together the refugee community (many of whom have escaped the ghetto) as it faces starvation and the threat of being found.
The drama also hinges on the conflict between the Tuvia and Zus, who prefers to express his grief through anger and an understandable desire to fight back. This all works well enough, but the film has one major stumbling block: the international cast are all required to speak English in Eastern European Yiddish accents and fail to achieve any sort of consistent pronunciation.
It's a distraction, but the burly Craig and Schreiber, as well as the slighter Bell, are all impressively expressive actors, and their sheer physical presence enables them to overcome the linguistic messiness.
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