Defiance

I would have enjoyed Defiance (2008) more had I not seen Tropic Thunder. You see, Defiance is exactly the kind of movie the Ben Stiller satire from this past summer skewers: a big-budget Hollywood effort that converts a tragic historical event into action-packed bombast (in Tropic Thunder, it's Vietnam, in this, it's the Holocaust). The heroes are brawny and butt-kicking, the chicks are gorgeous, and the guns are super-cool, but is this the kind of film that does justice, in any way, to the horror of the Holocaust? The Holocaust certainly had its heroes, but applying the Rambo template or even the Braveheart template (which this film frequently resembles) to mass suffering and genocide seems an indecency. That director Ed Zwick, who helmed The Last Samurai and Glory, clearly has his heart in the right place and is adept at epic historical action blockbusters mitigates the inappropriateness of genre to subject matter. Indeed, Defiance clips along at two hours with nary a lull, and will likely please the masses.

The film centers on two Russian-Jewish brothers, played by Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber who establish a secret camp of Jewish refugees in the wilderness during the Nazi occupation of Belarus. Tuvia (Craig) anoints himself leader of the camp, which grows to over a thousand. Zus (Schreiber) the more tough, cutthroat of the two, eventually joins the Russian partisans fighting the Nazis despite their complicity in anti-Semitic raids. The film depicts life at the camp which is interposed with action sequences of Zus at combat alongside the Russians.

Throughout the film, histrionic attempts at romance, humor, or tragedy plague the proceedings. One scene clumsily aspiring to poignance involves Zus finding out about the death of his wife and children. In quick succession, he hunkers down, vomits, and smashes his head against a tree. The camera then zooms onto his face, a steady stream of fake blood spurting down Liev Schreiber's head. Over-the-top acting and an inappropriate makeup cue, which attempt to make the moment "bigger" instead distract us from the gravity and devastating simplicity of what is occurring.

You don't have to be a feminist to object to the ogling to which the female characters are subjected, both by Zwick and the male characters. Their slender physiques and high cheek bones are incessant fodder for a persistent male gaze. Zwick generates plenty of laughs from showing the male characters checking out the ladies. In fact, comedy is a lot more prevalent than audiences will expect from a Holocaust film. The only problem is that about half the time, the humor isn't intentional. One scene which elicited unintended roars of laughter in the theater involved Zus and his lover, Bella discussing their attraction. With dialogue more fitting to a soap opera and treacly strings filling the soundtrack, their supposedly impassioned body language culminates in a hysterically indecent boob grab.

Daniel Craig has proven his charismatic action bonafides time and time again and does not disappoint here. His Russian accent is all over the place, but then again, so is every actor's in the film. He captures the sweetness and ferocity of his character, equally believable as a sensitive lover as a ferocious authority leader capable of using violence to quell Lord of the Flies-like power struggles within the camp. Even when the dialogue gets especially preachy, Craig valiantly trudges through, much like his embattled character. Meanwhile, Liev Schreiber struggles early on with the aforementioned histrionic moments, barely staying afloat in a vat of cheese, but as Zus comes into his own later in the film, so does Schreiber.

By far, the film's most serious and admirable aspect is the dynamic between Zus's imperative to fight against the Nazis in combat versus Tuvia's imperative to offer a stable society to as many Jews as possible. A scene that juxtaposes the marriage of younger brother, (Jamie Bell) in Tuvia's village with Zus engaged in combat elegantly articulates the role of animalistic violence as well as preservation of civilized society in saving the persecuted Jews. One is a fight for their lives. One is a fight for their souls. Zus and Tuvia are the Daddy and Mother of this moral construction.

What is missing most starkly from Defiance is a sense of tragedy. I've always contended that Holocaust movies which do not depict a main character dying are, by nature, un-serious. Perhaps the greatest tragedy of the Holocaust, at least to me, is the value of each individual life lost. By investing us emotionally in not a single character who falls victim to the Nazis, Defiance shirks the duty any artist is charged with when depicting the Holocaust: to depict the value in all of our existences, and the tragedy when that value is taken away so needlessly, so cruelly, and so systematically.