Defiance.

"[W]hen my childhood friend Clay Frohman suggested we make a Holocaust-theme film based on Nechama Tec's book Defiance, I groaned, 'Not another movie about victims,'" recalls Edward Zwick in the New York Times. "'No,' he said, 'this is a story about Jewish heroes. Like the Maccabees, only better.' The triumph of the three Bielski brothers, Tuvia, Zus and Asael, who fought the Nazis in the deep forests of Belarus and saved 1,200 lives, was unlike anything I had ever read about that dark time. Rather than victims wearing yellow stars, here were fighters in fur chapkas brandishing submachine guns. Instead of helplessness and submission, here were rage and resistance."

Updated through 12/31.

"Can no one stop Ed Zwick's reign of mediocrity?" asks Nick Schager. "Zwick's trademark talk-explosion!-talk-gunfire!-talk template is at this point so set in stone that his latest could have been directed by any second-unit director, though there's little about this reality-fashioned-into-fantasy 'true story' - aside from leading man Daniel Craig's participation - that might reasonably entice aspiring auteurs."

"The problem with Defiance is that it so quickly becomes a bore," writes Edward Copeland. "When it gets to fighting scenes, especially the climactic battle, it looks like Zwick merely restaged his melees from Glory and The Last Samurai with actors in costumes from a different era."

The L Magazine's Mark Asch notes that the "action-movie cut and newsreel-like stock is a merging of two styles of film rhetoric that are mutually exclusive: fiction shaped for effect and reaction, and truth starkly presented for its moral urgency. So, um, bullshit."

"Zwick has crafted over two hours of repeatedly bad ideas," writes Lauren Wissot in Slant. "There's a mechanical, running-the-extras-through-their-paces kind of feel to the director's heartless filmmaking; the action-fighting Rambo motif is wearying; and the empty, clichéd platitudes that pass for screenwriting - like 'Our vengeance is to live!' and 'Every day of freedom is like an act of faith' - are cringe-worthy, as is the requisite, sad-sounding, violin score that accompanies them."

Kim Voynar, at least, finds something nice to say at Movie City News: "Where so many films tend to beat the audience about the head and shoulders with boulder-heavy exposition that spells out everything inwrenchingly contrived detail, Defiance allows the brothers to speak for themselves in a real and honest way; because of this, the relationship between Tuvia and Zus is one of the film's greatest strengths."

Updates, 12/31: "Defiance presents itself as an explicit correction of the cultural record, a counterpoint to all those lachrymose World War II tales of helplessness and victimhood," writes AO Scott in the NYT. "This is a perfectly honorable intention, but the problem is that, in setting out to overturn historical stereotypes of Jewish passivity, Mr Zwick (who co-wrote the screenplay with Clayton Frohman) ends up affirming them. His film furthermore implies that if only more of the Jews living in Nazi-occupied Europe had been as tough as the Bielskis, more would have survived. This may be true in a narrow sense, but it also has the effect of making the timidity of the Jews, rather than the barbarity of the Nazis and the vicious opportunism of their allies, a principal cause of the Shoah."

"[I]f there's one instance of the road to perdition paved with fat budgets and good intentions, it's Defiance, or, as I prefer to call it, Custersky's Last Stand in Belarus," writes Ella Taylor in the Voice. "There is at least one audible theme directed at the State of Israel: Should a Jew seek vengeance, or save lives?... And lest it be unclear in the text, Zwick elaborates in the production notes: 'It's a story that compels us to ask ourselves: What would I have done in those circumstances?' This is a question well worth asking in an age when we cluck passively while genocides rage all around us, though it's hard to see how it's addressed in Defiance. Zwick goes on: "And in that way, I think, it becomes a deeply personal experience [emphasis mine].' In what way? That we are all, by extension, victims of the Nazis?"

"It's too bad that Zwick didn't feel secure enough about what's best about Defiance - the film's action-packed scenes of armed resistance against Nazis fighting in Russia - and found himself trapped in another archetype, that of the serious, self-aware, Important Holocaust Drama," writes Alonso Duralde for MSNBC.

"Over the course of several projects, particularly the recent Blood Diamond, Zwick has become quite proficient at crisply done action sequences, and the frequent fire fights and killings in Defiance have a powerful effect," writes Kenneth Turan in the Los Angeles Times. "Whenever Defiance departs from the harsher realities of its story, however, when it leaves behind the particularity of its story and deals with the generic, it risks trafficking in the kind of earnestness and sentimentality it is better off without."

Posted by dwhudson at December 29, 2008 8:11 AM