Wednesday, January 21, 2008

Defiance

by Bob Clark

There’s a moment somewhere in the middle of Defiance, Edward Zwick’s latest historical action-drama, where Daniel Craig, lectures a group of refugees from the Ghetto who have just joined his Belarus forest sanctuary to hide from the Nazis. As one-time smuggler and wartime hero Tuvia Bielski, he’s a throwback to Old-Testament leadership and sermonizing, casting James Bond as Moses to a flock of the people he’s seeking to free from a tyranny even worse than the days of Pharaoh’s wrath. Astride a gallant white horse before a sea of followers, Craig ably demonstrates why he’s always the most solid element in any film he’s involved in, but in the end the scene is capped with a joke, instead of the solemnity it’s earned, when a little girl asks her mother, “Is he really a Jew?”

On the one hand, that’s a good question-- Craig already played a Mossad agent in Spielberg’s messily earnest Munich, and somehow managed to convey unquestioning, bloodthirsty vendetta so palpably it makes his 007 seem tame by comparison. In Defiance, Craig is this time the voice against eye-for-an-eye justice, even in the face of the genocide of the Nazis and their local collaborators, while Liev Shrieber adopts the mantle of wrath as Tuvia’s less forgiving brother, Zus. In the film’s best moments, the appropriately Biblical confrontation between the Bielski brothers becomes an eloquently phrased question concerning the cause of the Jewish people, and the degree to which their destiny must be determined by violent reprisal, an issue which remains as relevant as the next big bombshell to hit Gaza headlines.

Unfortunately, the moments in which Zwick is able to articulate that agonizingly timely conflict of morals in a mis-en-scene that belongs to himself are few and far between, and all too often the movie suffers from owing far too much to far better films.

Case in point: towards the end, Zwick shows a sequence cutting between a wedding ceremony in the forest camp and an attack on a truckload of German soldiers by a Red Army battalion. Ordinarily, such an obvious crib from Coppola’s famous baptism-by-blood sequence in The Godfather might be forgivable-- even George Lucas could get away with borrowing from his old mentor in the bloodless, but harrowing montages from the last Star Wars prequel. To his credit, Zwick’s juxtaposition of a uniquely Jewish marriage and the fight against those who would slaughter their entire race is one that works. It’s especially effective, momentarily, thanks to the familial connection, since the bridegroom in question is the youngest of the Bielski brothers, played by Jamie Bell, who dances it up with his wife in the air while Shrieber’s Zus guns down Nazis in the cold snow and colder blood.

Soon afterward, however, when the forest-camp captures a lone German soldier and descends upon him in a vengeful mob while Craig and others look on disapprovingly, I couldn’t help but feel the sequence all too easily imitated Seven Samurai, as the villagers cry for a captive-bandit’s blood. When the Bielskis loudly executed Nazis and their Belerus collaborators, I couldn’t help but think of the partisan wish-fulfillment of Red Dawn, that gloriously absurd little piece of propaganda from John Milius that somehow managed to entertain equally as a Neo-Con’s worst nightmare and wet dream all at once. Even the Bielski’s makeshift forest encampment brought memories of Kevin Costner and his tragic accent hiding away from Nottingham in Ewok tree-houses.

But what does it say when a movie reminds you more of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves than the legend of Robin Hood itself, especially when their cause of stealing from Nazi collaborators seems somewhat in keeping with the spirit of Sherwood? What does it mean when Liev Shrieber’s enthusiastic shoud of “We are the Bielskis!” sounds suspiciously like the battle-cry of “Wolverines!” from Patrick Swaze and comrades? Why does the staging of communal vengeance so nakedly pattern itself after Kurosawa when such desire for retribution remains one of the few universal human traits? Zwick’s cinematic derivativeness nearly sabotages the film, and his surprisingly lax, undisciplined command of visual action would just about tank it if it weren’t for the strengths of its actors and the novelty of its narrative.

If there’s a saving grace to Defiance, it is that it manages to dig up one of the few true-stories of World War II that remained untold, and was absolutely worth telling. The fact that most audiences aren’t already schooled in the tale of the Bielski brothers guarantees that those who come to see it remain curious to see if they fare better than the martyrs of the Warsaw uprising. But just because nobody knows the film’s ending ahead of time doesn’t excuse the utter lack of attention devoted to building actual suspense throughout. Bryan Singer’s Valkyrie recently proved you can tell a story without any surprises and still keep people on the edge of their seats, and all Zwick goes to prove is that you can introduce filmgoers to an unheard tale and still prompt a yawn here or there.

It’s disappointing, considering how much ripe material there is in Defiance that’s passed over with relatively slight, unsatisfying results. Perhaps most saddening is how Zwick fails to fully capitalize on one of the most interesting aspects of the Bielski story-- that of the camp’s phenomenon of genteel, bourgeois women of Jewish society gravitating towards working-class men in the community for protection, rather than the previously attractive intellectual elite, who now find themselves useless mouths to feed in an agricultural wilderness. Like the rest of the film, the “Forest Wife” aspect is mentioned and discussed, but only fleetingly and substantively demonstrated on the screen, committing the cardinal cinematic sin of telling, instead of showing. It has sexual politics without actually feeling romantic, countless action sequences without feeling adventurous, and never once feels as epic as its subject deserves.

In the end, Defiance flounders like the rest of Zwick’s oeuvre of Hollywood history-lessons-- entertainment that isn’t particularly entertaining.