Defiance

Poland, 1941: Three brothers – the Bielskis – escape a Nazi-ordained massacre at their farm by the skin of their teeth. They hide out in the vast Belarussian forest, while Tuvia (Daniel Craig) waits for a chance to exact his revenge on the collaborators who murdered their parents. Yet to the consternation of his brother Zus (Liev Schreiber) every time Tuvia returns from a recce, he brings more Jewish refugees back with him into the forest. Soon they have a full-scale camp on their hands – mouths to feed through the winter, ailments to treat and, always, enemy patrols to evade.

Writer-director Edward Zwick made his name with the TV show thirtysomething, won an Oscar for the American Civil War drama Glory (1989), and has regularly taken up arms since: Legends Of The Fall (1994), Courage Under Fire (1996), The Siege (1998), The Last Samurai (2003), Blood Diamond (2006). My guess is Zwick grew up on war comics, boys’ own adventure stories and John Wayne movies. His movies mix earnest ideas with adrenaline charged action – a combination that unfortunately, tends to cancel itself out.

Defiance fits the pattern. It’s based on a true story, and wants to impress us with the hardships the Jews endured in their struggle, but it’s also a closet action movie. On some level, Zwick gets a thrill from showing Jews blowing up German supply cargoes, assassinating collaborators and engaging with the enemy.

I’m not knocking it. It’s an important historical question, whether the Jewish people should have offered violent resistance to the Nazi oppression. And anyway, I grew up reading those comic books myself. But don’t expect Defiance to measure up against Schindler's List or even Saving Private Ryan. It’s a solid, rather hackneyed war movie that might have been made 40 or even 50 years ago, give or take a few details.

Increasing hairy and dour as the movie goes on, Daniel Craig assumes the burden of leadership with grim determination but no enthusiasm. It’s a decent performance but the actor’s Bond credentials aren’t exactly helpful – you have to check yourself from wondering why he doesn’t just take out that battalion of Nazis single-handedly. Like the rest of the cast, he speaks English with heavy Eastern European accent, while Zwick reverts to subtitles whenever the characters speak Russian or German.

Neither Schreiber nor Jamie Bell looks much like Craig, but we can believe them as brothers as much as we can believe any of the characters in a movie much too prone to speechifying. Take the socialist intellectual, a chap who doesn’t know how to use a hammer but is prone to say things like “At least Descartes recognized the subjective nature of existence.” Or then there’s Allan Corduner’s asthmatic Talmud scholar, who takes to cursing God when the going gets tough but backtracks neatly when it’s time to meet his maker.

A squabble between Zus and Tuvia highlights different ideas about leadership, communal responsibility and family loyalty. Zus sees himself as a Bielski first and a Jew very much second. Tuvia, on the other hand, is willing to risk everything to save his people – including journeying into the ghetto of a nearby town and begging the elders to let their people go.

The movie is full of mud and muck, and I’d venture the visuals have been influenced by the powerful, groundbreaking Soviet war films Come and See and The Ascent, yet somehow Zwick sanitizes things, pulling back from anything that might be too unpleasant or tasteless. His heroes remain fundamentally unsullied (the most challenging scene has Tuvia turning a blind eye as the refugees get their hands on a German prisoner).

Defiance is heavy-handed, competent and interesting, but never as exciting as it might and probably should have been. By the standards of Come and See or Schindler’s List it’s distinctly mediocre. But given how few intelligent war movies we get these days, I’d rate it just a notch above average.

Tom Charity
tom.charity@lovefilm.com