Survivors.(Movie review)

In Edward Zwick's "Defiance," the beautiful light--a little dryer than life--has obviously been digitally altered. Yet apart from this minor shading there's not much in the film that could not have been done forty years ago. Zwick's film, a true Holocaust story that most people do not know, suggests some startling new ideas about resistance, sex, and class in the doomed provinces of Jewish Eastern Europe. But the moviemaking is resolutely old-fashioned--as square as an Arthur Miller play or an evening of Tchaikovsky. Does it matter? In this case, it does not. Zwick's conservative, humanist-sentimental style still has life in its aging limbs. "Defiance," as it turns out, makes insistent emotional demands, and those who respond to it at all, as I did, are likely to go all the way and even come out of it feeling slightly stunned.

Zwick based the movie on Nechama Tec's excellent 1993 book, of the same title, which chronicles, in great detail, an anomalous corner of history. In the late autumn of 1941, in Nazi-occupied Belarus, where Jews were being executed by the thousands, four brothers from a large Jewish farming family named Bielski, along with a few others who were determined to survive, went into hiding in the forest. Gradually, more ragged, hungry, and dazed people from the ghettos began to show up in the woods. In 1942, Tuvia Bielski, the oldest brother and the leader of what became known as the Bielski Otriad (Detachment), made two extraordinary decisions. First, he sensed that the best way to resist the Nazis was not to form a corps of, say, fifty young killers with machine guns but to take into the group every Jew who wanted to join, including the malbushim, the useless ones--the children, the elderly, the sick, the unskilled, the physically incompetent intellectuals--and to fight on so many fronts that survival itself became a weapon. Second, he realized that the group wouldn't last unless it actively collaborated with the ragtag remnants of the overwhelmed Red Army that were forming units to harass the Germans. Some in the Bielski group, joining the Soviets, became partisan fighters; some repaired clothing and weapons for the soldiers; the rest miraculously improvised a civil society, complete with a hospital, a bathhouse, and a tannery, even though they were often on the move. Eventually, some twelve hundred people gathered in the forest, and, by 1944, when the Soviets swept westward and liberated the area, only fifty or so had died. It was by far the largest and most successful Jewish armed rescue of Jews during the war.

At the beginning of the movie, some standard, blurry black-and-white documentary footage of German troops killing unarmed people glides smoothly into the staged action, filmed in sharp-focus full color, which is Zwick's way, I think, of telling us that the dramatization and the fictional invention are about to begin, but that they will remain close to the facts. The movie was shot (by the cinematographer Eduardo Serra) in forests near the ones inhabited by the Bielski group, and, despite the digital shading, I don't know when I've seen so much raw fresh air, so much rain, snow, and damp, so tactile a rendering of trees and earth. The movie is a kind of realistic fairy tale set in a forest newly enchanted by the sanctified work of staying alive. Zwick grounds the story in the labor and in the physical discomfort and irritability of townspeople living out of their element in ratty clothes, their skin withered and discolored from malnutrition. Everything is on a human scale, including the partisan battles. Those in the audience who remain eager, even after "Munich," to see Jews tear apart their enemies will not be disappointed. But the clashes with German troops, though excitingly staged, are presented not as an occasion for glory but as either a grim necessity of survival or an open expression of revenge.

"Defiance" is a Hollywood product, with decades of storytelling know-how behind it, and Zwick and the film's screenwriter, Clayton Frohman, have compressed and transposed events, defined and sharpened tensions, and, in general, shaped the material for emotional effectiveness and suspense. As the community grows, the dramatic center of the movie shifts to a Biblical struggle between two of the Bielski brothers: the touchy and aggressive Zus (Liev Schreiber) resents Tuvia (Daniel Craig), who takes control and suppresses any challenge to his authority. Zus wants to kill Germans, and Tuvia, milder (though hardly mild--he kills when he has to), wants to save Jews. After nearly destroying each other in a vicious fight, the two split up, and Zus joins the Soviets, while Tuvia becomes a kind of ...