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Defiance examines true story through Hollywood lens
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Daniel Craig takes a break from being James Bond in Defiance.
Edward Zwick’s Defiance is based on such a remarkable true story that it’s hard to imagine how it could be mishandled. Disappointingly, the well-paced film is blemished by stereotypes, bad dialogue and cartoonish action sequences.
Defiance tells the true story of four Jewish brothers from Poland who escape Nazi persecution and flee into the Belarussian woods, eventually building a nomadic safe haven for Jews seeking refuge during the Holocaust. The brothers Bielski (Daniel Craig, Liev Schriber, Jamie Bell, and a limited appearance by George MacKay), appointed leaders of the camp due to their knowledge of the wild, eventually butt heads over how they should manage both an increasing camp population with little resources and resistance against their German oppressors.
My expectations for Defiance were teased in the first minutes of the film when the Bielskis are introduced. Daniel Craig puts in great work as the conflicted oldest sibling, Tuvia, who is torn between enacting revenge for his murdered parents and securing safety from the Nazis. Liev Schriber plays a fantastic, if not clichéd, hotheaded war dog and second oldest. And Jamie Bell is adequate as the third eldest Bielski who solely reacts to his older brothers’ decisions and disagreements. Beyond the lead performances the rest of the cast is one-note caricatures. There is the pair of bickering intellectuals (Mark Feuerstein, Allan Corduner) who are incapable of physical labor but find the courage to each overcome their fears at the movie’s climax. A trio of blandly identical love interests is supplied to the Bielskis. And from the moment he appears on screen, a dissenting-voiced creep (Sam Spruell) blockheadedly foreshadows a mutiny. Lastly, the Russian partisans who form an uneasy alliance with the Bielski underground are represented by a Red Army version of the tired good cop/bad cop pastiche. One relates to the Jewish characters fighting alongside him while the other abuses them. This dichotomy becomes irrelevant late in the film when the decent Russian threatens to kill Jewish deserters.
Most of the important dialogue spoken ranges from wooden or gag-inducing. The script, penned by director Zwick with Clayton Frohman, is almost disturbingly cheesy at some moments. For instance, a bespectacled ex-writer feebly saws wood for a bungalow and exclaims, “If my friends at the New Socialist Club could see me now!” In another scene that made me cringe a little, Daniel Craig's Tuvia sneaks into a ghetto to convince its inhabitants to sneak out to the forest with him. In an imitation of the pinnacle scene of Spartacus, extras individually stand up and declare, “I’m going with him.” There is no variety of tone or wording present in any of these announcements. It looks and sounds exactly like it should not: staged.
The last and most picky of my complaints with Defiance is the goofy battle scenes that seem to mix World War II weaponry with Civil War tactics right out of Zwick’s Glory. I watched in curiosity as opposing forces ran at each other in open fields firing from the hip and hitting nothing. Both an armored tank and a German train are successfully assaulted using this method, all to a James Newton Howard score that recalls such adventures as Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom or Pirates of the Caribbean. While there are a few scenes that may accurately depict combatants using basic strategies such as taking cover and aiming, they are few and far between and not nearly substantial enough to overshadow some of the more ridiculous video game action represented in the movie.
I admit I wanted to love Defiance. Believing that truth is better than fiction, I had high hopes for this film and was suspiscious of any critic’s opinion to the contrary. But not even the true happy ending to this tale, which accurately concludes that the Bielskis saved the lives of over 1,000 Jews, could make me admire Defiance as a movie. The filmmakers managed to encompass the process of “Hollywoodizing” a true story, injecting clichés and cheese between incredible true events, contributing to my exponential frustration with this film.
Defiance is currently playing at Lincoln Square Cinemas, Regal Meridian 16, and Landmark Metro Cinemas in the Seattle area.
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