Review: Defiance

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 *****

Review: Slumdog Millionaire

The first of my film reviews. In honour of tomorrow's Oscar nominations, in which this film is presumably going to do extremely well, here is my review of...

BOYLE GOES SLUMMING

dir: Danny Boyle

starring: Dev Patel, Frieda Pinto, Irfan Khan

Danny Boyle is, his CV would suggest, a director with the filmmaking equivalent of ADHD. From the darkly comic thriller Shallow Grave to the rom-com on the run A Life Less Ordinary and the post-apocalyptic horror 28 Days Layer, he is constantly jumping with gleeful energy from one genre to the next, never allowing himself to make the same film twice. So it shouldn’t have really come as a surprise that he chose to make his newest project about “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire”. Not only that, but the Indian version.

Jamal Malik (played in his adolescent incarnation by Skins’ Dev Patel) is accused of cheating when he is one question away from winning the jackpot on the show, and must explain to the police how he came to know the seemingly random answers – which, of course, lie in his past as an orphaned street urchin living in the slums of Mumbai. The story jumps back-and-forth between the investigation, the quiz show, and a series of vignettes set in Jamal’s childhood. From there, there’s some stuff about destiny and True Love conquering all, but that is besides the point. Danny Boyle has never allowed his films to be dominated by story, which may possibly explain his inconsistent filmography, which is as shaky as the camera he uses to excitably chase his actors around with. For each hit he makes such as Trainspotting, he has a misjudged flop like The Beach up his sleeve, but the throughline of his career has been the energy, and Slumdog is no different.

As usual, Boyle directs with a hyper-kinetic, foot-stomping vitality and at first you’ll be glad to come along for the ride. With so much happening on screen, you won’t notice the limited emotional range of his actors, hidden behind the frenzied editing and vividly saturated colours of the cinematography. However, after a while, “frenzied” becomes “exhausting”, “vividy saturated” becomes “garish” and the weaknesses of Simon Beaufoy’s (The Full Monty) uneven screenplay become glaringly obvious. For with the gimmicky narrative hook determining the focus of the film, rather than the characters, this is one film where the story is the star, not Boyle’s directing, and this is where it all starts to fall apart.

The constant flashbacks for each question (which, by a wild coincidence, when taken in order correspond chronologically with traumas in Jamal’s young life) leads to the movie unfolding in a stop-and-start fashion that kills any suspense and robs the film of the energy that Boyle heroically tries to maintain for its entirety and ultimately become distracting. As these episodic vignettes become more and more repetitive (yes, we understand, growing up as an orphan in the slums was horrific, although the excitement and vitality that Danny Boyle has clearly found in Mumbai seems to be at odds with this message) they become a distraction from the quiz show element of the film, which becomes the most interesting of the many plots. Will Jamal win? What will happen if he does? And has it been rigged by the suspicious-looking host (you can’t imagine Chris Tarrant acting so horribly to one of the English contestants)?  Not that any of these questions matter, of course, as we are told from the beginning of the film that Jamal’s destiny “is written”. Nothing the audience feels and no plot obstacle dreamed up could possibly alter it, making any kind of interest we have in rooting for our protagonist to overcome the odds ultimately redundant.

Never losing his eye for the cinematic, Boyle ends with a clever, well-judged homage to the Bollywood movies that surely inspired him throughout the making of the film, but by the time the finale comes around, you’ll be so worn out and fatigued it’s just more white noise you feel you need sit through lest you miss the one vital moment that reveals the answer to the most important question at the heart of Slumdog Millionaire – why everyone seems to have fallen in love with this film.

VERDICT: ** out of *****

Welcome!

Welcome to my blog. This is where I intend to keep a collection of reviews and basic thoughts on film and television. It may seem a bit self-indulgent (as blogs are), but since I spend most of my time giving people my opinions, I thought I might as well write them down somewhere, then strangers will be able to read them too. So there you go. My mission statement, like Jerry Maguire himself.

As it's Oscar season, all the half-decent films that the studios have deemed worthy and classy have been suddenly released recently, and I've been trying to see most of them, so the reviews will be coming soon (hopefully). Plus, Oscar nominations are announced tomorrow, so I'll be posting my predictions later tonight or tomorrow morning.

Or, maybe this will be the only post I make and I'll never look at this blog ever again. It's happened before.