Film review

Edward Zwick (2008)

In 1989 Pauline Kael described Edward Zwick’s Glory as ‘a good film on a great subject’.  Since then, Zwick has strengthened his reputation as a director of thoughtful action films (Legends of the Fall, The Last Samurai, Blood Diamond).  I’ve seen none of his work since Glory but I can understand why he seemed to have the right CV for Defiance, which tells the true story of the Bielski partisans, three brothers from a Jewish farming family, who escape from the Jewish ghetto of Nowogrodek in Nazi-occupied Poland into the forests of Belarussia.  There they join Russian resistance fighters and endeavour to build a community in order to protect themselves and others from the Nazi invaders.   This is another true story made incredible in the telling; it reduces real heroes to war film stereotypes and is the kind of picture that gives Hollywood its reputation for crass traducement of reality for commercial purposes.   The film begins in 1941 and describes approximately the first year of the Bielskis’ life in the Naliboki forest.  The what-happened-afterwards legends at the end of the film include a note that the community continued for two more years, in the course of which they set up a school and a hospital.   It soon becomes clear in Defiance that Zwick and Clayton Frohman, with whom he wrote the screenplay (adapted from a 1993 book by Nechama Tec), aren’t interested in imparting any sense of how boring, as well as often terrifying, the community’s existence must often have been.  They want to concentrate on the physically exciting or visually arresting elements of the material.   According to these criteria, creating community services is too dull to merit any screen time.  In fact it’s hard to resist the suspicion that Defiance ends when it does because all the best fighting occurred during the first year of the Bielskis’ enterprise.

According to Wikipedia, Zwick started writing the script for Defiance in 1999, after he’d bought the film rights to the book, but eight years (production began in September 2007) wasn’t long enough to make it good.  Except for its several violent set pieces, Defiance – which runs 137 minutes – is dramatically inert.  Zwick may well have wanted to fuse the human interest and action elements of the material but all his talent has gone into the action and Defiance, as it slowly progresses, seems to be increasingly determined by generic requirements – which operate in isolation from the characters whose story Zwick is telling.  From the start, when their parents have been killed in the ghetto, the motives of the two eldest Bielski brothers, Tuvia and Zus, are sharply contrasted.  Tuvia wants to save the lives of his family and his fellow Jews, Zus to revenge his family and his people on the Nazis.   Yet it’s Tuvia who shoots dead the Polish collaborators he finds out were responsible for his parents’ death.  You want to know how this act of retribution affects how Tuvia sees himself and how Zus sees him but there’s no follow-up at all.   Once the shocking scene of Tuvia’s vengeance is in the can, he remains the calm humanitarian and Zus the angry avenger, as if nothing had happened to modify these conceptions.

Shortly after they set up camp in the forest, Tuvia decrees that there must be no pregnancies – the community can hardly feed itself, let alone newborn children.  It wasn’t clear to me (especially when he takes a lover himself) whether Tuvia was insisting on celibacy or just prudent use of contraception.   In any case, there’s no suggestion that he has reservations about his sexually inexperienced younger brother Asael getting married.  Any such reservations might have got in the way of one of Defiance‘s set pieces, when Asael’s wedding is intercut with scenes of the killing of German soldiers by Soviet partisans, whom Zus has left the community to fight with.  Later on, one of the women reveals to Tuvia’s lover Lilka that she is pregnant with – on the point of giving birth to – the child of a German soldier who raped her.  Lilka says she’s sure that Tuvia will understand but the woman, in great distress, says he mustn’t know.   In the next scene, Tuvia hears a baby crying, sees the newborn, and gets mad.  Lilka pleads with him – but doesn’t explain how the woman came to be pregnant until there’s been an opportunity for Tuvia to rant and Lilka herself to get upset.

The photogenic imperative is very strong here (the cinematographer is Eduardo Serra) so that it sometimes takes precedence over other kinds of cliché.   A shot of a hammer trying to crack ice tells us that winter has arrived but that turns out not to be the harbinger of scenes of the community suffering in the freezing conditions.  Instead, the snow is used principally as a magical, beautifying feature of the sylvan wedding of Asael and his young bride.  (The fine white horse that Tuvia rides – until he sacrifices it to keep the community in food – completes the effect.)   Spring comes, the women bathe in a stream, and they look mostly healthy as well as pretty.  It’s nonsense when Bella, the woman who holds a torch for the absent Zus, says that she’s become a skeleton.   (The members of the community are sometimes dirty and pale but, except for the death scene of an elderly schoolmaster, they rarely look seriously ill.)

Even allowing for the deficiencies of the writing, most of the acting is impersonal.  This is the sort of film where the actors’ faces express their awareness of being involved in an elevating, honourable enterprise (or they think it is, anyway) but not much else.  Daniel Craig has a particular difficulty in this respect – as well as playing Tuvia, he’s also at pains not to be playing James Bond.  As a result, Tuvia is even more opaque in the playing than in the script.   On hearing the news that his wife has been murdered in the ghetto, Tuvia continues reading and Zwick cuts away before Craig has the chance to express even self-control.  When the other partisans set about a lone Nazi soldier and bludgeon him to death, Tuvia looks on inscrutably – too civilised to join in but not, although he is the leader of the community, disposed to intervene (nor, as far as we can see, reminded of his own avenging actions earlier in the story).   The dying schoolmaster says that he nearly lost his faith as a result of the Nazi atrocities but that Tuvia has restored it – ‘You were sent by God’:  as Tuvia hears these words, Craig’s face is hard to read but he doesn’t appear to disagree.   Whether or not it’s intentional that Tuvia is as alienatingly superior as he comes across as, this helps Liev Schreiber, as Zus, give by far the best performance in Defiance.  Schreiber brings to the role some humour (he has a great laugh, which seems to come from deep inside) and human believability.  He convinces you that Zus’s joining the Russians is motivated partly by a need to get away from the suffocating righteousness of Tuvia.  Although he eventually rejoins his brothers with (ludicrous) action-hero timing, Zus returns to the fold virtually as a prodigal brother – as if accepting that Tuvia was absolutely right.

The ethnic implications of the casting and the playing are generally unfortunate.   Perhaps because they have no characters to develop, most of the actors in the minor roles – whether they’re playing Jews, Soviets or Nazis – tend to fall back on conventional racial mannerisms (and a black German shepherd dog seems to be especially aggressive because of his Nazi allegiances).  There are exceptions but they make matters worse.  Allan Corduner as the schoolteacher and Mark Feuerstein as an intellectual who, in practical matters, is a schlemiel, are playing familiar Jewish characters – in familiar Jewish character style.  Alexa Davalos, Mia Wasikowska and Iben Hjejle, as the love interest of, respectively, Tuvia, Asael and Zus, don’t need to be played as Jewish stereotypes because their roles are defined in terms of gender rather than ethnicity.   As physical types, Daniel Craig, Liev Schreiber and Jamie Bell (as Asael) are an unlikely trio of brothers – at least, Schreiber looks very different from the other two.  (Until I looked up the film online after seeing it, I’d completely missed the fact that there was a fourth, much younger brother – Aron, played by George MacKay.)  That might not have been a problem but Zwick has everyone speak in middle-European-accented English, and Schreiber is both much more comfortable than Craig or Bell doing this and able to give easy Jewish inflections to his lines.  This has the effect of emphasising that one of the three actors has conventional Jewish looks and the other two don’t; and, more troublingly, making Zus’s questionable aggressive attitudes seem Jewish behaviour, while Tuvia the hero looks like a Gentile.

Edward Zwick is quoted on IMDB as follows:

‘You have these chapters of history that get lost … Sometimes that’s down to political agendas or because mythologies are created. Ideas and events that are contradictory to those myths often disappear.  That’s what’s happened here. The image of European Jews going passively to their deaths is inaccurate. We hope this film corrects that view, while also exploring the specifics of the Bielski story.’

Of course what the Bielski partisans did deserves commemoration (even though – at least if Wikipedia is to be believed and – there are more controversial aspects of their activities between 1941 and 1945 that are not mentioned in this film).   The legends at the end of Defiance explain that Asael (although there’s no suggestion that he’d be inclined to do this) joined the Red Army and died in 1945; after the war, Zus emigrated to New York and set up a trucking business; Tuvia (and Lilka) joined him there subsequently.  Tuvia and Zus are both now dead but they have descendants; there must be people around who knew them in New York, and perhaps even some survivors from the forest community.  Zwick might have done better to structure the film around such ‘witnesses’, as Warren Beatty did in Reds.  The director, as well as the audience, could then have learned more about the reality of the brothers’ relationship.  If Zwick had delivered on the intention he suggests in the IMDB quote, Defiance might have been another ‘good film on a great subject’.  As it is, it seems an example of a filmmaker who was drawn to a subject with decent intentions but who has wrongly assumed that ‘an amazing true story’ must, by its very nature, make a credible human drama.

14 January 2009