Saving Bond: Daniel Craig (above) rescues hundreds of Jews in Defiance. (photo by KAREN BALLARD)

Fighting Boredom

Only the insipid Edward Zwick could take the action out of Defiance.

by Sean Burns

Is Edward Zwick the dullest filmmaker in America?

He’s certainly one of the most infuriating—time and again discovering fascinating stories buried in the corners of history, only to completely botch their revelation. Zwick movies invariably balloon into lumbering white elephants, embalmed in the icky molasses of awards-season prestige and corny Hollywood contrivances.

The Last Samurai could’ve been an absorbing take on ancient tradition colliding with a modern world, but instead devolved into a lovingly photographed tribute to the wind blowing through Tom Cruise’s hair in slow motion.

Blood Diamond had all the ingredients of a gripping, topical thriller, but instead played out as a morbid procession of Oscar clips, climaxing with the preposterous sight of a gutshot Leonardo DiCaprio making not one but two weepy farewell phone calls while in the middle of a gunfight.

There’s a specific sort of turgidness to an Edward Zwick film, an oatmeal blandness evident since his feature debut, 23 years ago, when he distorted David Mamet’s scathing play Sexual Perversity in Chicago into a sitcom-like vehicle for Rob Lowe and Demi Moore called About Last Night …

There’s obviously no material that this man can’t flatten with his tedious middlebrow sensibility.

Zwick does it again with Defiance, making a cheesy mess out of the captivating, little-known tale of the Bielski otriad. In 1941, four hard-drinking, rough-hewn criminal brothers headed deep into the Belarusian forest, building a kibbutz where they and fellow Jews could hide from Hitler’s goons and wait out the war. The Bielski brothers saved hundreds of lives, but these wondrous facts don’t provide enough nobility for Zwick. This is such a damned good story, he’s determined to oversell it.

Daniel Craig—the blonde-haired, blue-eyed 007 who apparently became an honorary Jew after Stephen Spielberg cast him in Munich—stars as Tuvia Bielski, and we can tell right away he’s supposed to be the hero because he makes gaseous proclamations from atop a white horse, his every utterance underscored by a martial bleat from of composer James Newton Howard’s trumpets. The rest of the people in the movie are always seen gazing upward at him in slackjawed awe.

Well, everybody except for Zus, Tuvia’s hot-headed little brother, played with a swarthy intensity by Liev Schreiber. Zus just wants to kill as many Germans as he can, but Tuvia insists that “living will be our revenge.” These two have many tiresome parable-inflected arguments that play like bad knockoffs of the Talmudic debates Tony Kushner wrote for Munich.

Meanwhile, the third brother, Asael (Jamie Bell), sheepishly stands off to the side, presumably wondering the same thing as the audience: What casting director in their right mind thought James Bond, Liev Schreiber and Billy Elliot could pass for brothers?

Shot by cinematographer Eduardo Serra in that same digitally tweaked, washed-out color palate that’s become the cliche for WWII movies since Saving Private Ryan, Defiance ignores what’s most interesting about its own story in favor of a ton of stock scenes we’ve already seen; there are no surprises here. When the saintly elderly Hasidic comic abruptly coughs mid-quip, everybody knows what’s going to happen to him within the next 10 minutes. There’s even a gooey romance between Craig and Alexa Davalos, which arrives out of left field and seems to be motivated by a producer’s decree that every big-budget Hollywood film must have a romance in there somewhere.

Still hungry for vengeance, Schreiber’s Zus takes off to fight with the Russians. Zwick and his co-screenwriter Clayton Frohman take a couple of jabs at the irony of Jews enlisting alongside a bunch of virulent Anti-Semites, but as is the case with any potentially interesting idea in Defiance, this one takes a back seat to the plot mechanics of a risibly inauthentic rescue sequence.

By the time estranged brother Zus rides in like Han Solo to save Moses Skywalker’s butt at the exact moment when things look hopeless, Zwick’s done it again. He’s made a true story feel awfully false.