Susan Granger’s review of “Defiance” (Paramount Vantage)
This is the amazing, true-life story of how the three rugged Bielski brothers fled from rural Poland into the Belarusian forest in 1941 and managed not only to hold off the German Army by grudgingly working with Russian partisans but also to conceal 1,500 Jewish civilians during the Holocaust. Their admirable saga begins when Tuvia (Daniel Craig) and Zus (Liev Schreiber) discover that Nazis have murdered their parents, along with many others, as part of the mass execution in the Novogrudok ghetto. Only their terrified younger brother, Asael (Jamie Bell), has survived, crouching in a cellar. After they take vengeance on the killers and gather some weapons, the trio flees into the dense woods where they find other refugees in hiding. Despite an unexplained animosity and rivalry between them, Tuvia calmly emerges as the group’s idealistic, protective leader, while Zus, the angry fighter, forges an uneasy alliance with Russian soldiers. For three years, the tough, tenacious Bielski Otriad, as they became known, bravely and nobly run a remote, secret community dedicated to survival. Inspired by Nechama Tec’s non-fiction book, it’s a shame that screenwriter Clayton Frohman and director Edward Zwick chose not to tell – as Paul Harvey would say – the rest of the story: i.e. how the surviving Bielskis emigrated to Brooklyn, where they worked as cab owners and truck drivers. An early development script started with a customer in the back seat of a taxi suddenly realizing he was being driven by a Bielski; too bad they didn’t go with that narrative frame instead of a linear, historical narrative. Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber are convincing, so on the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Defiance” is an earnest, intense 8, asserting, “Each day of freedom is a victory.”
