Defiance

[January 14th, 2009]

The opening credits of Defiance unspool over a montage of Nazi atrocities—historical footage of Jews rounded up and shot point-blank—so that it comes as a great relief when the second scene begins with Daniel Craig greeting his sleeping brother by throwing a rock at his head. “If I was a German,” he says, “you would be dead.” Thank goodness, this is going to be an Edward Zwick movie after all. Zwick’s fondness for goofily exaggerated machismo was firmly established in Glory and The Last Samurai, and after a cinematic season of unavenged suffering, it’s nice to be in the company of a director who believes that, well, yes, violence does solve some things.

Craig plays a silver Jew silverback named Tuvia Bielski, a heroic thug who guns down the police who rounded up his parents for the SS, and then teams up with his brothers Zus (Liev Schreiber) and Asael (Jamie Bell) to create a Belarussian forest hideout. Here, thousands of fellow Jews eventually take refuge and form a makeshift civilization, all while making guerrilla raids on the Nazis. This is a true story, never before dramatized on film, though if it seems familiar that may be due to an uncanny structural and tonal similarity with 1984’s Red Dawn. The Bielski partisans share a heedless tough-guy mentality with young Patrick Swayze’s Wolverines—Zus greets potential Nazis with the salutation, “You like to shoot Jews, little shit?”—and Defiance even improves on John Milius’ adolescent fantasy by adding sex: The bravest fighters each take comely “forest wives,” with whom they enjoy apocalyptic honeymoons before grabbing their pistols.

Zwick’s general heavy-handedness is a fun match for this vengeful material, and he even lets up the bombast from time to time: A shot of ghetto escapees ripping gold stars from their coats is rousing because it’s uncharacteristically understated. Defiance only becomes troubling in retrospect, as it dawns on you how completely the warrior code clashes with the setting. Daniel Craig is rugged, grave and selfless, but the idea of helpless people gaining strength by unquestioning allegiance to a strongman eventually plays as more than a little fascist. R.