Film

In the canon of Holocaust cinema, Defiance scans as an explicit inversion of Schindler’s List: Both films are true stories about 1,000 Jews who survived, but while Schindler’s casts a gentile as an audience surrogate, in Defiance, it’s personal. As virtually the first Holocaust movie to show Jews taking arms against the Nazis, this story of the Bielski Brigade—a group of Jews in Belarus who spearheaded a resistance in the woods—satisfies a certain basic bloodlust. The film can seem crudely reductive, both in its contrast of the Bielski brothers—Tuvia the ethical leader (Craig); Zus the hothead (Schreiber), who wants to forge an alliance with Russian partisans; Asael the awkward suitor (Bell)—and its shorthand dramatics. (Dissent in the ranks is conveyed by having a sneering, mutinous creep demand larger rations.) But it’s hard to deny the movie’s gut-level effectiveness.

If the presentation is consistent with Zwick’s usual foursquare approach—on-the-nose dialogue (“I suppose you’d have to say I…am an intellectual,” says one of the Bielski recruits, describing his profession), impossibly convenient timing in action sequences—the movie remains deeply compelling throughout, a surprise after Zwick’s face-clawingly dull Last Samurai. Joshua Bell violin solos notwithstanding, this may be the most restrained filmmaking of Zwick’s career; rather than supersizing the film’s scale, he embraces the claustrophobia of the forest and works with it.