Review: Defiance

***½ / *****

Gramov: "How come it's so fucking hard to like Jews?
Tuvia Bielski: Try being one."

Edward Zwick tends to make action films of more substance than the typical Hollywood special effects dross. There are stories contained within his films, and if an occasional action scene occurs to amp up each one's bombast and make it more marketable to wider audiences, Zwick seems content to walk that tightrope. If none of his films are necessarily great cinema (except for Glory), they're not entirely disposable either.

With Defiance, Zwick has potentially the best story material of his career with which to work, and reports that he spent a dozen years getting the true-life World War II story to screen suggests his respect for the source material. Though its performances are always engaging and the story nothing if not compelling, the film almost collapses under its action film quota and by a script that fails to articulate its ideas past the most obvious conclusions. Though it's unfair to call the film disappointing, it never achieves its gripping potential, either.

Defiance centres on the true story of the four Bielski brothers, Polish Jews who fled into the Belarusian Naliboki forests after the Nazi advance killed their parents. The brothers, Tuvia (Daniel Craig), Zus (Liev Shreiber), and Asael (Jamie Bell), initially planned to use the forest's resources to outlast the Nazi advance. But fellow Jewish refugees continued to wander into the forest, defenceless, and the brothers found themselves both their caretakers and protectors. As word of Nazi and Nazi-sympathizer atrocities filtered their way to the group's ramshackle encampment, Zus began leading others on raids both for food and revenge.

Tuvia and Zus are opposites, and their understated hostility, fuelled by Zus' badgering but agitated by Tuvia's evasiveness, drives much of the film's early drama. It's a neat trick that screen tough guy Craig should play the more inward, methodical brother, the one given more to planning than action. By contrast, Shreiber's Zus is a snarling bear of a man with percolating Socialist sympathies and a deep resentment of the pretentious, wealthier Jews who now need the Bielskis' help. He eventually decamps to join a Soviet partisan band elsewhere in the forest, leaving Tuvia, Aseal, and youngest brother Aron (George MacKay) to help the swelling band of helpless refugees endure a freezing winter, Typhus outbreak, and a constant scarcity of food.

The film runs into trouble when it becomes time for something to happen, and what happens arrives too little or too late to bring the film together into a decisive success. It's strange that a 137 minute long action film should feel hollow near its center, but the lack of context given to the refugees' struggle doesn't ground the film. Other reviews have suggested that the lack of visible on-screen antagonists - a Nazi villain à la Ralph Fiennes' Amon Goeth, for example - keeps any sense of danger from becoming too palpable. But such absence speaks to Zwick's fine intentions but also his struggles as a storyteller. The script confines the struggle to the forest, creating a hyper-reality that should propel the mounting tension; yet the episodic structure (there must be a half-dozen sub-plots, not all of them necessary) incessantly diffuses forward momentum. Events begin to simmer and then the story shifts to one of the myriad other plot threads.

This lack of concentration also makes the plot and film itself feel longer than they are, which again with a two hour-plus runtime only serves to make the story baggy. Some of the sub-plots are worthy of greater development: the camp layabouts who bully their weaker neighbours, the tension between the richer Jews and their poorer relations, a touching romance between Asael and a young villager (Mia Wasikowska). Other plots, including Zus' bonding with his Soviet compatriots and a going-through-the-motions romance between Tuvia and an aristocrat (Alexa Davalos), never get the room they need to develop. It's not that they're poorly played - Shrieber, Craig, and Davalos could all probably summon chemistry with a brick wall - but that the storylines themselves are as malnourished as the camp's inhabitants.

But, as with Zwick's The Last Samurai, all the character work leads up to a fine, giant set piece battle climax, this time involving the long-feared full-strength Nazi assault. The two set pieces comprising the third act, a firefight against a tank and a bombing raid on the camp, are effectively staged even if they feel perfunctory arriving so close to the film's ending. Zus' cavalry charge rescue is also, unfortunately, Hollywood hokum at its finest. When the postscripts arrive - and make no mistake, this is the kind of film for which postscripts were invented - you almost feel as if the end is finally come, even as the story presented begins to peter out. Films at their best tell us worthy stories of the human struggle. Defiance does its story justice, even if it doesn't quite excel at becoming a work of art in and of itself.