Defiance
The refugees stagger through the woods, the Nazis a fresh memory at their heels. They come to a clearing where a secret village has sprouted, full of the sounds of hammers and industry. The newcomers are addressed by a strapping, brooding blue-eyed man on a white horse. He lays down the rules: Everyone works, the women had better not get pregnant. Welcome to the one place in Belorussia where a Jew can be free.
A little boy asks his parents incredulously, "He is a Jew?"
You bet, kid, and never forget it. From its title down to its throwaway references to the fighting Maccabees of old, "Defiance" is a warhorse of a movie dedicated to the notion that not all the Nazis' victims were lambs led to slaughter. Well, of course they weren't, but the makers of this earnest, stolidly rousing drama have a point. Holocaust movies too often dramatize passivity. This one defiantly refuses.
Unfortunately, that refusal is couched in the mawkish, accented language of Hollywood melodrama, down to the lip gloss on the women. It's a hell of a story, though, and true in almost all its particulars. There were three Bielski brothers, Tuvia (Daniel Craig), Zus (Liev Schreiber), and Asael (Jamie Bell) - a younger fourth (George MacKay) doesn't figure much in this telling - and they did hide 1,200 fellow Jews in the forests of Belorussia through the majority of WWII, fighting off Nazi assaults, brokering wary alliances with Russian partisans, and maintaining a sense of community and tradition in a fragile, ever-growing encampment.
Depressingly predictable in its dialogue and dramatic beats, "Defiance" is most interesting as a study of unlikely leaders. The Bielskis were the bad boys of their village, constantly in trouble with the authorities, yet that natural resistance is what made them survivors. After their parents are killed in the initial Nazi invasion, the four brothers slip into the woods to fight another day. When they're joined by softer types - women and city folk - they have to decide whether to battle the enemy or protect the innocent.
That's the dynamic that sustains the movie for much of its 137 minutes, and at times "Defiance" seems as if it wants to split into two separate films. Schreiber's Zus is the macho, hard-nosed freedom fighter who joins up with a group of Russian guerrillas; as much as they hate Jews, they admire the way this one breaks Nazi heads. The scenes between Schreiber and Ravil Isyanov as Viktor, the cruelly circumspect leader of the Soviet partisans, are a weirder, better, more complicated movie than anything else here.
By contrast, the scenes back at the makeshift shtetl, where Tuvia is trying to maintain order amidt chaos and starvation, are ordinary in their TV-miniseries dramaturgy. Craig is trapped playing an action hero obsessed with keeping the peace, and he never figures out how to convincingly dramatize the paradox. (Accordingly, he glowers a lot and groans under the weight of civic responsibility.) Only a scene where a captured German soldier is dragged into the encampment - it's ugly and it sticks with you - pierces the veil of historical reenactment.
Director Edward Zwick knows how to keep things moving, and the battle sequences have an effective sub-Spielberg sense of mayhem. Screenwriter Clayton Frohman writes signposts instead of characters, though, and he gives them placards for dialogue. "If my friends at the New Socialist Club could see me now!" crows the village intellectual (Mark Feuerstein) as he saws away at a crossbeam. The professor played by the fine British actor Allan Corduner is a schmaltzy cartoon next to the death-camp doctor he played in 2001's unsparing "The Grey Zone," and his final moments edge helplessly into Monty Python territory.
And there's this, too: By treating the notion of the Fighting Jew as a historical novelty, Zwick and Frohman unwittingly step on the toes of all those who did push back. (Not to mention avoiding the endlessly complex issue of the modern Fighting Jew; for that, see "Waltz With Bashir," also opening today.) What the Bielski brothers did in the forests of Belorussia deserves to be remembered and celebrated, but this glossy studio production robs them of life. It's not just new Holocaust stories that we need, but new ways of telling them.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to www.boston.com/movienation.
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