Category | Arts & Living

Movie Review: “Defiance”

Published on January 27, 2009 by Daniel Singleton

Daniel Craig as "Tuvia Bielski".

You know a movie isn’t working when you start thinking about other movies.  That’s all I did during “Defiance,” a movie about a group of Russian Jews who hide in the forest and kill Nazis.  I thought about “The Counterfeiters.” I thought about “Black Book.” I thought about “Schindler’s List” and I thought about “Army of Shadows” because “Defiance” photocopies these films mercilessly.  Not steals.  Photocopies.  I would have been cool with theft–stolen ideas can work incredibly well if the thief steals carefully and pays attention to detail–but “Defiance” copies worse than Xerox.  Bland, shallow and fake are the key words here.

But it’s based on a true story, so most people will ignore the way scenes that used to be believable and realistic now scream “This is Hollywood!”  There’s one early scene where some Jews out on night patrol spot a German truck and take cover on the side of the road.  As bad luck would have it, the truck stops and one of the Germans steps over to their hiding place, zips down his pants and relieves himself all over them.

What would you do in that situation?  (Remember that you’re heavily outnumbered and outgunned.)  You’d stay quiet, of course.  Stabbing the German’s knee will make you look cool, but you won’t survive unless you’re immortal, which these Jews are.  Seriously, somebody must have told them that movie heroes can’t die twenty minutes into the film, because they pull out their guns and go crazy in less than two seconds.

Better movies about the resistance (“The Counterfeiters,” “Army of Shadows”) stayed away from John Wayne-heroics because it never saved anybody.  “Defiance” throws them in whenever it can. The characters can’t die, so why not?  There’s another early scene where a Jew runs the wrong way during an ambush and leads a whole company of machine gun-toting Germans into the forest.  Think he’s dead?  As dead as the guy who ran the wrong way in “Army of Shadows?” You thought wrong.  His brothers find him ten minutes later, hiding in a cellar with a twenty-year-old girl that, you guessed it, he falls in love with.

And speaking of scenes that don’t make sense, did you ever meet anybody who knew less about guarding illegal camps than their watchman?  For God’s sake, this guy lets not one, not two, but three heavily-armed strangers into the camp.  Real people wouldn’t last three days with this guy.  The Jews last three years.  I think they let him stay because he made them laugh.  You don’t need a watchman when you’re never in danger – you need comic relief!

Never in danger?  Yep.  The Germans only show up at the beginning and end.  Now, I’m not saying that you can’t turn the Germans into an unseen menace that we feel more than see – Melville did it brilliantly in “Army of Shadows” – but it only works when the characters act they’re trying to survive a war.  The freedom fighters in “Shadows” walked slowly and never smiled; they knew that they couldn’t stop the Germans.  The Jews in “Defiance” laugh all the time: War?  What war?  We need to find forest wives!

So the movie doesn’t have much Jew on German action.  That means “Defiance” lives or dies by the drama inside the camp.  It dies.  Instead of making history buffs like me happy and telling us exactly how these people survived in a makeshift camp – how they governed themselves; how they found food; who watched the kids – it gives us a bunch of characters, conflicts and lectures straight from “How to Make an Epic, Vol. 1.”  There’s the Confident Leader.  The Hothead.  The scene where a loudmouth pushes the leader too far.  The stock romance between the shy boy and the shy girl.  And so on and so forth.

The movie did have one brilliant scene.  Towards the end of the movie, they capture a German soldier.  He’s just a kid, young and scared, and I completely expected them to do the “noble” thing (i.e., chicken out) and let him live. The movie had been chickening out for almost two hours.  Why stop now?  Wrong.  They beat him to death with his own rifle.  It’s so brutal and powerful that it made me angry that the rest of the movie falters so much.