True Story Defiance a Hollow Act
Barely eking out a survival in the frozen forests of Eastern Europe, the Bielski brothers – coolheaded eldest Tuvia (Daniel Craig), angrily aggressive middle son Zus (Liev Schreiber) and impetuous teenager Asael (Jamie Bell) – decide to protect their fellow Jews from the invading German army by any means necessary. Creating their own enclave within the frigid green protection of the trees, they hit back at their attackers with violent precision, even going so far as to team up with the cocksure Russians all in order to make sure more of their friends and neighbors aren’t sent to the concentration camps and executed.
Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber in Paramount Vantage's Defiance
I saw the new WWII war drama Defiance back in early November in order to potentially interview the film’s director Edward Zwick. Sadly, that interview never came to pass, but considering I haven’t felt compelled to write a single word about the film until now (it opened in New York and Los Angeles last month so it would be eligible for Oscar consideration) that’s probably not such a bad thing.
The simple truth is that this movie has not stuck with me in the slightest. While I remember a great deal about it, so little has stood out for me one way or the other that working up the energy to pound out this review has been relatively difficult to come by. For all its teary, heartfelt melodrama and bloodily chaotic machine gun fury there is very little here to hold on to, and while sitting through all 137-minutes is hardly a chore it’s not like doing so has done me any favors, either.
This is actually somewhat surprising. Say what you will about Zwick but his films, whether they be good (Blood Diamond), bad (Legends of the Fall) or magnificent (Courage Under Fire), have a tendency to germinate long after you’ve left the theater. From Tom Cruise’s highly silly cavalry charge in The Last Samurai to Demi Moore’s fantastic last line in the otherwise dreadful About Last Night… the filmmaker has shown a flair for the memorable, and anyone who’s marveled over the final pulse-pounding seconds of Glory as many times as I have knows exactly just what it is I’m talking about.
Gifted with a stirring true story that shockingly has never been told by Hollywood before, Zwick seems so obsessed with making sure that he gets all the technical elements right that he forgets to include a beating pulse worth accelerating along with. The Bielski’s, for all their heroism, are cardboard cutouts and not fully formed flesh and blood freedom fighters, and for all their shouting, barking, grunting and daring-do I just wasn’t captivated by any of it beyond maybe a gentle shrugging of the shoulders in modest appreciation.
Not that his actors, most notably Craig and Schreiber, don’t give it their all anyhow. In fact, while I was shrugging my shoulders during the majority of the shooting matches and pyrotechnic whiz-bang, when these two finally decided to stare one another down mano-a-mano that was the moment when I almost started to feel that glorious spark of electric anticipation run up and down my spine.
In all fairness these two men really do invest their all into this production. Both of them, especially Schreiber, disappear so far inside their characters their prior roles almost (emphasis on the almost – one of them is the current 007, after all) vanish from consciousness. They give it their all, every drop of sweat and ounce of blood given in protection of their comrades as believable as a cut on my own wrist splattering droplets of crimson upon a snow-white kitchen floor.
But that’s really about it as far as the highlights are concerned. Sure the action sequences are staged with panache and flair (the climactic siege against a German garrison particularly so) but the script has so few emotionally genuine hooks to it that caring is disappointingly difficult. And while James Newton Howard’s (The Dark Knight) score suitably soars and Eduardo Serra’s (A Girl Cut in Two) cinematography looks sweepingly stunning the core of the piece is so frustratingly hollow and familiar all their hard work ends up being for nothing more than naught.
Zwick, for all his cliché Hollywood tendencies, can be a good director, sometimes even an exceptional one. Unfortunately, this is not one of those times, his work on this as empty as a soldier’s canteen after a particularly taxing march up a steep icy hill. While the story at the heart of Defiance deserves to be told, this doesn’t do it, and I defy anyone to walk out of the theater thinking anything close to otherwise.
- review reprinted courtesy of the SGN in Seattle
Film Rating: êê (out of 4)
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