Jan. 17, 2009

Reviewed by Richard Lee Zuras

Released Jan. 16, 2009

2 hr. 17 min.

R

Edward Zwick/The Weinstein Company

Daniel Craig

Liev Schreiber

Mark Feuerstein

Jamie Bell

This is a truly defiant movie. On one hand Defiance is the true story of a band of Jewish me, women, and children who fled to the Belarussian forests during Hitler’s 1941 campaign. But it is more than that–big an event as it were. This is a movie wherein everyone involved defies our usual expectations. Leave it to others to hash out the vagaries of what must be within a war/holocaust film. In Zwick’s world (and let it be noted that his film production company has been called Bedford Falls since the days of he and Herskovitz’ vastly under-appreciated Thirtysomething) Art and History interweave in noteworthy defiance.

There are few Nazi soldiers in this film. There are no shots (save a wide-shot of a mass burial trench) of Holocaust victims. The U.S. army (not yet even in the European theater) is not coming to their rescue. The Russian army is, with few exceptions, willing to integrate its Jewish “comrades” into its unit. Women are allowed and quite willing and able to shoot weapons and defend themselves. This film also allows them to be shot and die painful “war” deaths.

It gets even more defiant, this under-appreciated little film. As the small band of defiant ones grows into a small town on the run, a new reality sets in. Zwick, to his credit, is all the more willing to explore (even within the visual cornucopia of war) the day-to-day truisms of the human race. It is a defiant act to show, in constant detail, how even a society banded together for their ultimate survival, will and indeed must fall prey to the unsavory laws of humanity.

Who is leading us? Can I have more food than that person? Is my job not worthy of more reward than his? The questions never end. The answers are in short supply.

The defiance goes on. The oldest and among the wisest of the band begins to lead everyone in a prayer asking God to “choose another people.” It is a poignant moment indeed. To the masses he is inferred to be speaking of another people to take their current place. To the learned theologian he is referring clearly to the place of the Jew in the eternity of The Hebrew Bible. This is a group defiant enough to leave the certain death of the ghetto (by way of the work/death camps), defiant enough to take up arms against their oppressor, and ultimately defiant enough to question God’s plan.

It is all the more defiant, as the word-scroll that ends the film explains, that these men and women of the resistance sought no recognition for what they had done. It is with gratitude that some tens of thousands of their descendants thank them for their lives.

Bottom line: 4.0/5.0