Review #7: In Theaters Now - DEFIANCE

If I could describe this film in four words……..These Jews fight back…

“Another sunny day in LA, (I love LA) what a great day for a movie at the Grove (I love the grove),” I thought to myself. And so went my day…I met my mom for a refreshing iced blended caramel at the Grove’s coffee bean and felt excited and in the mood to see this romantic comedy called “Defiance,” My mom had recommended it and had already seen it the day before. Don’t ask me why I thought this movie was a romantic comedy because it is the exact opposite of that. The fact that I am a college-student, who has stopped watching T.V. and never sees movie trailers or posters, probably had something to do with my misconception. The point is: I certainly was not prepared to see what was about to ensue on the screen for the next two and a half hours.

The story (which is a true one by the way) goes like this: The Bielski brothers escape into the Belarussian Forest in order to survive the Nazi occupied Poland. More and more Jews find their way in to the forest and build a community where they must all work and fight to survive.

Man, do I HATE war movies. You could pick a war scene from Forest Gump and drop it in any other war movie and I probably wouldn’t notice. Fight scenes always look so generic to me. They seem to be shot in the same way: lots of ammo, lots of men down, lots of shouting, lots of forest…blah blah blah. Okay, okay okay, so here’s the thing…when you are watching a Holocaust movie these complaints kinda have to be thrown out the window since the fighting is necessary and not gratuitous or excessive. I know that you could say that about a lot of war movies but the thing that really made me forgive this one for being in a genre that I semi-despise was that the scenes of the brothers building the forest camp were much more important than the fight scenes.

Being a Jew, I have been exposed to an extensive amount of films and literature about the Holocaust and was not expecting this movie to be much different from the things I have seen and read. I was pleasantly surprised to finally see a new type of Holocaust survival tale, however. You guessed it; this was the story of the “defiance” of the Jews. Never do we hear of Jews fighting back like they do in this film. The movie did an excellent job of humanizing the killers on both sides, which made the movie all the more interesting, realistic and heart wrenching.

(SPOILER ALERT) You would think that watching Jews kill a Nazi would be sickeningly pleasurable, but this was not the case. In the first scene of Jewish revenge, Tuvia (the eldest Bielski brother) goes in to town to kill the police officer that murdered his father. Although Tuvia’s revenge killing is totally justified the audience is shown the face of the trembling Nazi begging for his life with his wife beside him screaming for mercy. This gives us no chance to revel in the violence. Instead, it puts the audience in a strange position where we relate to that human face of the Nazi, but also know that this terrified face has killed a father, a mother, a son, a daughter…In this way the scenes of violence in “Defiance” are really different than your average war movie.

The images of the helpless human body in the face of death reminded me of David Cronenberg’s “A History of Violence” where Cronenberg meticulously creates a scene in which the audience can revel in violence because the victim is deserving of it, but after the fact a close-up shot of the dead body makes us immediately feel disgusted and remember that the villain is still human like us. Even though “Defiance” puts a face to the Nazi, it in no way attempts to make the audience sympathize with the Germans. It is clear that the Jews fight to survive, and the Germans fight to kill…for this reason, Nazis are always the animal regardless of how “human” they are portrayed.

The stories of survival, the fighting, the relationships between the brothers, the loves that blossom in the forest camp, and the community that is built are all naturally woven in to each other and nothing seems forced or over the top.
Overall this movie was worth seeing. SEE IT. Even if you don’t like war movies, or Holocaust movies SEE IT. It’s a true story and an important one that should be told and spread.

-Sarah B.