Just got in from a screening of Defiance, and I just don’t get where the negativity towards this film is coming from in certain quarters. I’ll preface this with two disclaimers: First, that I do happen to like much of Ed Zwick‘s work, in particular Glory, which is still one of my favorite films ever, and Defiance is pretty much Glory for the Jews in WW2; and second, Defiance grabbed me from the opening scene, which very closely mirrored events in my own family history when the Nazis invaded Poland.
We’ve seen many films about the victims of the Holocaust, but not as many about those who fought back; it’s an important piece of Holocaust history, and Zwick has done a solid job here of taking historical facts and real-life remembrances from those who were there and melding a lot of information and history into a compelling, two-hour dramatization of those facts.
I’m kind of surprised how much I liked this film, given some of the criticism I’ve heard of it …

Jeff Wells over at Hollywood Elsewhere wrote this last week:
The reportedly awful Defiance gets a #7 ranking from Sean Smith and #9 rankings from Kris Tapley and Anne Thompson, and Che, which is so much more than that Ed Zwick film that comparisons are a waste of breath and brain cells, is blanked by these three?
Since he’s saying it’s “reportedly” awful, one can assume that Wells is basing his judgment of the film on what others have told him in ranking it so far below Che. Aside from being supercilious, this is just outright laziness from anyone writing about film. Maybe he doesn’t like Zwick, period, and he’s basing his assessment of a film he hasn’t seen on that, but slamming a film you haven’t even seen by saying that comparing it to another film you’ve been pretty much advocating for non-stop since Cannes is a “waste of breath and brain cells” is ridiculous — and I say that as someone who loved Che and has strongly advocated for it.
Actually critiquing Defiance based (presumably) on seeing it, Variety‘s Todd McCarthy, in his rather tepid review, had this to say:
But through the remaining hour-plus of the script by Clayton Frohman and Zwick — as malnourishment and illness hit the community, romances blossom, Zus wrestles with whether to stick with the Russians or return to the fold, and Tuvia, faced with aerial bombing and approaching Nazi troops, must lead his people, like Moses, across water to safety — it all becomes pretty standard-issue stuff, filled with noble and tragic heroism, familiar battle images and last-second rescues.
So, in other words: the real life hardships these people endured in surviving years of Nazi occupation in the forest — the near-starvation, the life-threatening illness with no access to medical care, the bombings, the narrow escapes in which real lives were lost … ho-hum, so dull, been there, done that, nothing dramatically interesting in there? The honest heroism of a guy who’d never in his life been thought to be anything remotely heroic, always a troublemaker, the kind of guy most “good” parents would keep their innocent daughters locked away from, rising up to become a leader and help save all these people he didn’t have to, in an act of selflessness that changed and defined who he was as a person … so trite. Seriously?
For me, one of the strongest things about Defiance was Zwick showing the dueling aspects of these people defying the Nazi regime: One brother, Zus (Liev Schreiber), chose to fight back (for awhile, at least) by joining the Russian army and killing as many Germans as possible, the other, Tuvia (Daniel Craig) by building this community of people, and helping them continue to find joy in living as much as they could in exile, taking other lives only when necessary, after he finds that slaughtering those responsible for killing their parents does not bring him peace.
The real beauty of the film (and the story on which it’s based) is not just in the lives the Bielski brothers saved, but in what they gained themselves by the risk Tuvia in particular took upon himself (and put his younger brothers into) by taking on the responsibility for the safety and survival of all these people who he quite unexpectedly found depending on him.
They could have, as Zus suggested early on, just gone off on their own and survived in the forest by their wits; they’d been surviving against the law their whole lives, the Nazis were just a different kind of authority figure. But that’s not the choice Tuvia Bielski made, and in so making that choice he did do a noble thing, which Zwick dramatizes here quite movingly.
I’ll have more on Defiance later, but for now, suffice it to say, I liked it quite a lot, and very much disagree with the specific points of criticism of the film — most of which pretty much mirrors McCarthy’s take –I’ve been hearing up to now.

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