DVD Review: Defiance

Sometimes riveting, often flawed World War II true story arrives on DVD and Blu-Ray this week.

Defiance writer-director Edward Zwick (The Last Samurai, Blood Diamond) has a long history of making action movies with more substance – though only slightly – than the typical Hollywood special effects dross. There are actual stories contained within his films, and if an occasional gunfight or epic battle sometimes occurs to amp up each one’s bombast and make it more marketable to wider audiences, he seems content to walk that tightrope. If none of his films are necessarily great cinema, they’re not entirely disposable either.

With Defiance Zwick has potentially the best story material of his career with which to work, and published reports that he spent a dozen years getting its true-life World War II story to screen suggests his respect for the source material. Though the film’s performances are always engaging and the story nothing if not compelling, it nevertheless almost collapses under its action movie shoot-em-up quota and by a script that fails to articulate its ideas past the most obvious conclusions. Though it’s unfair to call the film disappointing, it never achieves its gripping potential, either.

 The film centers on the story of the four Bielski brothers, Polish Jews who fled into the Naliboki forests after the Nazi advance killed their father. The brothers, including Tuvia (Daniel Craig, Quantum of Solace), Zus (Liev Shreiber, X-Men Origins: Wolverine), and Asael (Jamie Bell, Jumper), initially plan to use the forest’s resources to outlast the Nazi occupation. But fellow Jewish refugees continue to wander into the forest, defenseless, and the Bielskis find themselves both caretakers and protectors of the growing refugee population. As word of Nazi and Nazi-sympathizer atrocities filter their way to the group’s ramshackle encampment, Zus begins leading raids both for food and revenge.

Tuvia and Zus are opposites, and their understated hostility, fueled by Zus’ badgering but agitated by Tuvia’s evasiveness, drives much of the film’s early drama. It’s a neat trick that screen tough guy Craig should play the more inward, methodical brother, the one given more to planning than action. By contrast, Shreiber’s Zus is a snarling bear of a man with percolating Socialist sympathies and a deep resentment of the “pretentious,” wealthier Jews who now need the Bielskis’ help. He eventually decamps to join a Soviet partisan band elsewhere in the forest, leaving Tuvia, Aseal, and youngest brother Aron (George MacKay) to help the swelling band of helpless refugees endure a freezing winter that brings with it a Typhus outbreak as well as a constant scarcity of food.

The film runs into trouble when it becomes time for something to happen, and what happens arrives too little or too late to bring the film together into a decisive success. It’s strange that a 137-minute long action film should feel hollow near its center, but the lack of context given to the refugees’ struggle doesn’t ground the film. Other reviews have suggested that the dearth of visible onscreen antagonists – a Nazi villain a la Ralph Fiennes’ Amon Goeth in Schindler’s List, for example – keeps any sense of danger from becoming too palpable. But such absence speaks to co-writer Zwick’s fine intentions but also his struggles as a storyteller. The script confines the struggle to the forest, creating a hyper-reality that should propel the mounting tension; yet the episodic structure (there must be a half-dozen subplots, not all of them necessary) incessantly diffuses forward momentum. Events begin to simmer and then the story shifts to one of the myriad other plot threads.

This lack of concentration also makes the plot and film itself feel longer than they are, which again with a two hour-plus runtime only makes the story feel flabbier. Some of the subplots are worthy of greater development: the camp layabouts who bully their weaker neighbors, the tension between the richer Jews and their poorer relations, a touching romance between Asael and a young villager (Mia Wasikowska). Other plots, including Zus’ bonding with his Soviet compatriots and a going-through-the-motions romance between Tuvia and an aristocrat (Alexa Davalos, Feast of Love), never get the room they need to develop. It’s not that they’re poorly played – Shrieber, Craig, and Davalos could all probably summon chemistry with a brick wall – but that the storylines themselves are as malnourished as the camp’s inhabitants.

As with Zwick’s The Last Samurai, all the character work leads up to a giant set piece battle climax, this time involving the long-feared full-strength Nazi assault. The two set pieces comprising the third act, a firefight against a tank and a bombing raid on the camp, are effectively staged even if they feel perfunctory arriving so close to the film’s ending. Zus’ cavalry charge rescue is also, unfortunately, Hollywood hokum at its finest. When the postscripts arrive – and make no mistake, this is the kind of film for which postscripts were invented – you almost feel as if the end is finally come, even as the story presented begins to peter out. Movies at their best tell us worthy stories of the human struggle. Defiance does its story justice, even if it doesn’t quite realize the same accomplishment for itself.

- Michael Kabel

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 (Note: An earlier version of this review originally appeared for the film’s theatrical release.)

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