Defiance
a movie review by Heather Craig
Everyone has heard of Oscar Schindler, the German industrialist of otherwise questionable character who saved 1200 Jews from the Nazis during the Holocaust. Yet despite saving the same number themselves, the Bielski brothers are still largely unknown. Filmed in Lithuania, Defiance takes place in western Poland, modern day Belarus. It is the story of the Bielski brothers, responsible Tuvia (Daniel Craig), hotheaded Zus (Liev Schrieber) and shy Asael (Jamie Bell), who, when the systematic raids of Polish towns and villages began to round up and murder Jews, fled to hide out in the huge woods. Their parents had both been killed in raids, as were both Tuvia and Zus’ wives and Zus’ child.
Other Jews also congregated in the forest. They joined the brothers who were a capable trio, finding food and building shelters. Soon they were joined by many who had escaped the genocide, those living in barns, who had heard of them and wanted to live free. (I saw this movie with a woman who as a child had had a neighbor who lived in a barn for three years hiding from the Nazis.) The group eventually swelled to 1200 people. Most who joined them were educated people who knew nothing of living off the land, and so the fairly uneducated Bielskis became the leaders of the group.
While the Bielski group hid in the woods for three years, the film focuses on the formative first year. They went on food and wood gathering raids, kept sentries, and constantly moved to avoid Nazi patrols. This was not always successful and camps were attacked more than once. Tuvia became something of the camp commander and his word was law. Zus preferred revenge to domestic duties and resented his brother’s authority, to which absolutely everyone except a couple of camp troublemakers deferred.
Women in the camp were in a bad place in more ways than one. Oh sure, they weren’t in Auschwitz or the Polish ghetto (although many of them had come from the ghetto), but now they were in a survival of the fittest society in which every woman had to have a “forest husband” or man who was her lover/protector in the forest and kept the other men from bothering her. Many at the camp were separated from missing spouses and the “forest husband/forest wife” concept did allow people to have some comfort.
While there were sympathetic outsiders who sometimes helped them, to get food, munitions, and medications the group went on a lot of raids, some with the assistance of the Soviet army, who are portrayed as blatantly anti-Semitic, but somewhat sympathetic to the plight of the Jews. The Bielskis stole, committed sabotage, and even killed a few Nazis. The hardships the camp people endured, including wintering basically outside in weather so cold that it turned back Hitler from his Russian offensive, is hard to imagine.
The brothers were all far from perfect. Tuvia had bouts of doubt about his leadership, along with completely freezing more than once in knowing how to proceed. Despite this, he also went to fatal lengths to maintain his authority at camp. Zus was a womanizer who enjoyed revenge way too much to be healthy or even completely sane, and Azael, who undergoes the biggest character change, is too sensitive for the life at hand.
Anyone who has seen Munich knows that Daniel Craig can play the steel-eyed, revenge-seeking Jew, but that is not how he played Tuvia. Tuvia is weighted down by the burdens of leadership, questioning himself, yet never turning away anyone from camp, no matter if they were children or elderly. I thought his best Tuvia moment came when they are literally between the Nazi soldiers and a bog, and everyone is asking Tuvia what they should do. The panic in his eyes is complete.
In Wolverine Liev Shrieber portrayed a thug who enjoyed violence too much. However, there it seemed basically silly to me. Perhaps because Zus is more three dimensional, it was real in this movie. I did, however, get the impression that he enjoyed playing a man who did most of his talking with his fists.
Jamie Bell, best known for playing Billy Elliot when he was only fourteen, does a compelling turn as the follower brother whom circumstances turn into a leader.
The movie is based on the book Defiance: the Bielski Partisans by sociologist and Holocaust scholar Nechama Tec. It is co-written, produced and directed by Edward Zwick (Glory, The Last Samurai), who for me will always be the kindly yet all-seeing therapist in the Zwick TV production Once and Again. Zwick employs a lot of sweeping shots to give the impression of a massive forest, and of the impressive number of people hiding in it. There are a number of great reaction shots in which with a glimpse we can see how the crowd feels, whether shock, relief or whatever, about what Tuvia or Zus has just done. Zwick keeps his actors looking filthy, particularly Craig.
The movie is in English, spoken mostly with a Polish accent. In their dealings with the Soviet partisans, Russian is spoken, and there are subtitles. My viewing partner, who speaks Russian, let me know that Daniel Craig’s Russian is not impressive and Schrieber’s is much better. This detail didn’t bother me because maybe the real Tuvia’s Russian wasn’t that great.
The movie doesn’t hide from deaths at the Bielski hands but nor does it visit a current controversy being investigated by the Polish Institute of National Remembrance on whether or not they participated with the Soviet partisans in war atrocities, specifically a massacre of 129 Poles. These charges are denied by the Bielski family, various war historians, and the survivors from the Bielski camp.
DVD extras include a commentary, interviews with the children and grandchildren of the now-deceased Tuvia and Zus, a short “making of” feature, and a lovely photo montage of the faces of the camp survivors still living. I was pleased to realize what pains were taken with script and production to be as close to what actually occurred as possible, especially with the characters of the brothers themselves. Maybe this should have been obvious when the movie began with the phrase “A true story.” Not “based on a true story” or the dreaded “inspired by actual events” but “a true story.” Much is made in the extras that this is a different Holocaust story in that these people were not victims. They fought back. I will admit that some of the more emotionally satisfying, and in one case, more emotionally disturbing, moments in the movie occur when they are very actively fighting back.
