Daniel Craig Stars in Defiance
Craig and Liev Schreiber Co-star as Jewish Heroes in True WWII Story
Dec 7, 2008
The place: a farm in Eastern Europe. It is 1941, and the Nazis are pushing through Poland and crossing borders into Belarus, killing entire Jewish families in a murderous sweep based purely on Hitler’s irrational hate. The three adult Bielski brothers discover the bodies of their parents at the family farm. They rescue a teenaged cousin hiding there and escape to the thick, neighboring forest they grew up exploring.
Daniel Craig Temporarily Puts James Bond Aside
Soon, they encounter other Jews fleeing the Nazis, and they band together. The oldest brother, Tuvia (Daniel Craig, temporarily freed from his cinematic Bonds), asserts control, wresting authority from his next-youngest brother, the equally headstrong Zus (pronounced “Zeus”), played by Liev Schreiber.
Eventually, the group of Jewish partisans grows into the hundreds, and survival means building an encampment, enforcing strict rules about work, food, guard duty, even pregnancy. (Tuvia rightfully insists there’s no way to properly care for infants in such conditions. This rule is tested later in the film.)
Jewish Community
A real Jewish community emerges, one in which a weird normalcy develops – joyous weddings are even staged, even in the midst of raging battles with the invading Nazis.
Moral questions abound. The central paradox seems to be: Does killing Nazis and their sympathizers make the Jews no better than their enemies? The question poses a brief agony, because the refugees know what they must do to survive.
Complicating matters is the vast cultural schism between the Jews themselves. Working class farmers like the Bielskis struggle with the orthodox and intellectuals.
Will God Help?
Their differences are fundamental: Do we fight and possibly survive, or do we acquiesce and pray for God to save us?
(Even uneasy allies -- Russian soldiers -- are surprised that the Jews resist the Nazis. A Russian commander sneers, “Jews don’t fight.”
(Replies Tuvia, “This one does.”)
Connection to thirtysomething
Director/ producer/co-screenwriter Edward Zwick is a long way from Thirtysomething in the mid-80s. Zwick, whose features include Glory and Blood Diamond, has found a true story that’s a perfect bookend to Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. The film has an earnest atmosphere suggesting the story means as much on a personal level to Zwick as Spielberg admitted Schindler meant to him.
The battle scenes are effective and frightening, although thankfully with a minimum of gore. And the human relationships are well drawn, in particular between Tuvia and his love interest Lilka (Alexa Davalos) and especially in Tuvia’s sibling rivalry with Zus.
As in the Bond films, Craig’s rock-hard persona works well, although physically he looks more Aryan than Ashkenazi – which makes the acceptance of him as Schreiber’s brother rather problematic.
The film drags on for nearly two and a quarter hours, and could use some trimming. Still, as a story of heroism and survival, Defiance deserves recognition alongside Schindler and Roman Polanski’s The Pianist as an uncommonly moving meditation on the Holocaust and the price of survival.
It opens wide Jan. 16, 2009.
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