Directed by Ed Zwick (Glory, The Siege, The Last Samurai, Blood Diamond)

Starring Daniel Craig, Liev Schreiber, Jamie “Billy Elliot” Bell

Synopsis: “Jewish brothers in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe escape into the Belarussian forests, where they join Russian resistance fighters and endeavor to build a village in order to protect themselves and about 1,000 Jewish non-combatants.”

Very entertaining and enjoyable viewing experience. Not the usual description of a film that takes place during the holocaust. I guess I would say that most holocaust films end up being unbearably depressing because any sense of hope or optimism is crushed under the weight of the philisophical and emotional quandaries brought on by the unfathomable evil at the heart of such a concept. Defiance did not follow this trend. This film, instead, focuses on the story of these three brothers and what they did to help the people that they could, while avoiding, though not ignoring, the wider attrocities of the time. Looking at the holocaust from hindsight is something that we have trouble with because we are attempting to “understand” what led to it and why, while this film shows that people at the time could not be bogged down by such notions, whether they knew the full extent of Nazi intentions or not, because their main concern was survival.

The thing that I like most about the film is that the brothers are not “canonized” in their portrayal. Sure, you are rooting for them all along, and they are certainly heros, but they aren’t absolutely benevolent and marked with ridiculous conviction of their moral duty. Instead they are shown as confused, vulnerable, and deeply flawed people who are simply doing everything within their means to survive (though they do sometimes sacrifice great opportunities to take the moral higher ground, which I think is not a stretch).

My only complaint is that the beginning of the story seems truncated. The film begins en media res (I think thats the term), and as a result we are never given a sense of what their lives were like before the war. While you do not need this information to understand the story (since we all know that Nazis are bad. Duh.), I would have enjoyed a few scenes to explore the dynamic between “collaborators,” who helped the Nazi’s, with the local Jews in the community before the Nazis came and sparked everything off. I just feel that including those scenes would have completed the viewer’s emotional experience in which we could follow the trajectory of the characters from the beginning of their story, rather than being thrown into the middle of things.

Overall, great.

Definitely Rent It. maybe even buy it.