One wishes stories of resistance to the Nazi program to exterminate the Jews were more prevalent. As director Ed Zwick pointed out, introducing his film "Defiance" at a recent private screening, for a long time family members who were survivors of the Holocaust spoke of their experiences in hushed voices, lest the children, ears glued to the walls anyway, would not hear. The attempt was to shield the young from such horror, but children are attracted to the forbidden. In a similar cultural empathy to Steven Spielberg's finding the material for Schindler's List, Ed Zwick found a biography of the Bielski brothers. The history that informs his riveting action adventure movie starring Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber involves three brothers (with Jamie Bell) who hide out in the woods of Poland; as they worked building shelters and finding food--and fought just to stay alive, other escapees found them; in one daring move they evacuated Jews from the Warsaw ghetto. Living in the forest in the manner of a commune, needless to say, many perished. It was important to Zwick that the impulse to avenge the deaths of so many did not translate to blood lust for these brave Jews. The brothers make conscious decisions to steer away from the wanton inhumanity of the perpetrators, with some exceptions. As Jews, both Craig and Shreiber exhibit a soft-centered machismo, defying the picture of the bearded intellectual herded into concentration camp. The decision for his characters to speak Polish and Russian added to the verisimilitude, and makes this film at least sound less contrived than many of the season's Holocaust-era offerings. Zwick was especially eager to hear the response of Elie Wiesel to his film. Wiesel had one complaint regarding an effective artistic choice, said Zwick, referring to the opening when black and white archival footage gives way little by little to dramatization in full color. You are allowing for the blurring of fact with fiction, Zwick recounted the writer/survivor's words, and that's dangerous to do when it comes to the Holocaust.
Regina Weinreich
Graphic Design: Salpeter Ventura
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