BOND OF BROTHERS
dir: Edward Zwick
starring: Daniel Craig, Liev Schreiber, Jamie Bell
Hollywood has always been fascinated with the Holocaust, and it’s easy to see why. Without wanting to sound too crass, it has all the elements that great stories are made of – the conflict between good and evil, the idea of mortality, the questioning or reconfirmation of faith. It was a period of history that explored the very extremes of humanity, but so far, the majority of stories told about this most horrific episode in our history have been about the destruction of the Jews, going to their unavoidable deaths with dignity. Defiance, we are told, is different. Here, the Jews fight back.
It certainly is an intriguing true story, ripe with cinematic promise. In Belorussia, 1941, three brothers are forced to flee the Nazis, hiding in the forest where they lead their fellow survivors into creating a new community. There, they struggle over the choices that their actions have left them with – Tulvia (Daniel Craig), world-weary and noble, wishes to live their new lives in secret, Zus (Liev Schreiber), violent and intense, is desperate to get revenge on their oppressors, while little brother Asrael (Jamie Bell) is caught in the middle.
That is about as deep as any of the characters go, as Defiance is not a film concerned with individual people but with the lives of the community as a whole. The disparate band of survivors are painted with broad, clichéd strokes (intellectual, philosopher, bastard), designed to simply represent the different aspects of society, and our three central heroes struggle to create any chemistry that would suggest real brotherhood, meaning that by the time we arrive at the action scenes, we really don’t care who lives or who dies.
And the action scenes do arrive, for this is a film in which, lest we forget, the Jews fight back. However, shoehorned in at regular intervals, just when the scenes of day-to-day life in the forest camp start to get tedious, they seem almost calculated to smother a Hollywood sheen over the story, as if the studio was afraid that the rest of the film just wasn’t interesting enough, and they may have had a point. For while the tale of the Bielski brothers is certainly worthy of telling, in the hands of director Edward Zwick, it comes across as uneven, not sure whether it wants to be serious entertainment or just serious.
Zwick is a director with honourable intentions with an interest in telling stories about the struggles that different cultures have had to face. However, he seems to be genuinely unaware that his films always use the plights of minorities simply as a device to redeem his white heroes, from the white commanding officer shepherding the black soldiers in Glory to the white American hero saving the dying-way of the Japanese warriors in The Last Samurai or the white smuggler protecting the African from his own social naivety in Blood Diamond. Defiance is no different, and in the end there is no escaping the slightly uncomfortable image of the decidedly un-Semitic looking Daniel Craig nobly leading the helpless Jews to safety. Make no mistake, despite the promises that the film seems to make at the start, the Jews are still the victims here – moaning and complaining, in desperate need of someone to protect them. If this is as close as Hollywood can get to changing those preconceptions, then it seems like the Jews really do need to fight back.
VERDICT: ** out of *****
