Defying Sensitivity
Edward Zwick makes another lackluster attempt in his latest film about the Holocaust to bring understanding to the horrors of human tragedy.
By Jeremy Konar
February 9, 2009
Director Edward Zwick with Daniel Craig and Mark Feuerstein on the set of Defiance. Photo by Karen Ballard. (allmoviephoto.com)In a scene from the recent film
Defiance, a young boy runs through the woods in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe and stumbles upon a mass grave. The contorted bodies of hundreds of naked, dead Jews are strewn on top of one another, a testament to the brutality of the Nazis who put them there. While it was clear that the movie’s producer and director, Edward Zwick, meant for me to feel shock, outrage, and disgust, I only felt oddly unaffected.
Perhaps I’ve been desensitized and numbed by the constant flow of violent images from Rwanda, Sudan, and Bosnia. Perhaps I am immune to photographed death and carnage. Maybe I watch too much television. Or, maybe, there’s a tragic flaw in Zwick’s filmmaking, one that bars the emotion that ought to come through this scene.
Zwick, who co-wrote, produced, and directed Defiance, didn’t stray from the formula that garnered him five Academy Award nominations for Blood Diamond in 2006: Combine the real-life suffering of people of a specific ethnicity or nationality with a romantic storyline between a well-known actor armed like Rambo and another well-known actress. Allow the narrative to unfold in a way that avoids delving into complex issues while remaining sanctimoniously aloof. And the cardinal rule: Don’t characterize your downtrodden minority too much, or it’ll be more difficult to indiscriminately blow them to pieces to reach your required Hollywood body count.
Defiance is a curiously un-Jewish film about Jews. It is based on the true story of the Bielski brothers, who narrowly escaped the Nazi’s ethnic cleansing of Belarus by hiding in the forests where they built a community that resisted the Nazi forces and created a safe haven for over a thousand Jews fleeing the Nazis. The somewhat rousing, though far from powerful performances of Daniel Craig, who plays the group’s levelheaded leader, Tuvia, and Liev Schreiber as the angrier, more vengeful Zus, don’t make up for the film’s puddle-deep moral explorations. The questions the brothers face about whether to exact revenge on the vicious German forces and the indifferent population and how to deal with dissent in the community are briefly addressed and rapidly brushed aside in favor of gratuitous violence and contrived romances.
Perhaps the film’s emptiness stems from its failure to characterize the members of the Bielskis’ community as what they are: Eastern European Jews, a population already in exile and once again in danger, with their own unique culture and values. Besides the Bielskis, Zwick introduces a few women who serve as wholly irrelevant concubines to the brothers.
Shamon (Allan Corduner) and Isaac (Mark Feuerstein) are two additionally inconsequential characters that are represented as squabbling intellectuals who deliver lines about the subjectivity of existence. Shamon and Isaac are representative of the European ghetto Jew, a frail, bespectacled type with an incredible recall of Torah passages and a complete inability to wield a hammer.
Near the end of the film, in what is supposedly a moment of courage, Isaac rushes at a line of assaulting German infantry armed with nothing but a primed grenade and is immediately riddled with bullets. As if this end isn’t bad enough, the grenade explodes in his hand. True to form, the rest of the Jews in the camp, nameless and faceless, become canon fodder during intense Nazi assaults.
Zwick might have learned from Blood Diamond that an audience can’t be expected to empathize with people who are constantly being blown up. Starring Leonardo Dicaprio, Jennifer Connelly, and Djimon Hounsou, Blood Diamond’s exploitation was in the same vein as Defiance. If Zwick had balanced action with a thorough examination of the complexity of Sierra Leone’s trouble—a post-colonial blend of foreign intrigue, the abuse of civilians by warring factions, and the world’s collective indifference—the film might have achieved its lofty goals.
Instead, Blood Diamond surrendered to the demands of mere entertainment. We’re expected to accept that foolish, pedantic quips from Connelly, the tearful journalist, about “giving a shit” provide the film with a humanitarian message. Images of anguish in Africa aren’t the same thing as addressing issues of anguish in Africa. The great irony of the film is Zwick’s seemingly complete unawareness of his own exploitative filmmaking; the result was a failure to turn the nameless masses we already see on CNN into human beings. Zwick similarly failed to bring sensitivity to the issues raised in Defiance.
Zwick did have a handful of moving scenes in Defiance. One such scene was when Tuvia bursts into the home of a Nazi collaborator whom he overheard bragging about killing his parents. Armed with only a revolver and shaky nerves, he finds the man at dinner with his two sons and wife. Initially he hesitates as the man begs for mercy, but when one of the sons tries to draw Tuvia kills the family and flees. Shaken, he later admits to Zus, “I can still see their faces.” But the poignant moral considerations of the moment—what good is retribution? What satisfaction in an eye for an eye?—quickly fade away and are lost in Zwick’s frivolous filmmaking.
There’s no doubt that Zwick had only the best intentions for the people he portrayed in Defiance and Blood Diamond. But the pandering to the blood-and-guts quota of mainstream cinema in both films undermines any humanitarian message he meant to send, and in that sense Zwick perpetuates the indifference he ostensibly tried to combat. He piled up more than enough bodies to fill that grave, after all.
Jeremy Konar is a third-year student at Brandeis University and is currently studying in the Netherlands at the Universiteit van Amsterdam’s International School for Humanities and Social Sciences.
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Defiance has ended up pretty popular in Israel, from what I hear. Plenty of people are happy with it.
— Joe - Feb 9, 11:43 PM - #“women who serve as wholly irrelevant concubines to the brothers”
— J. Biels - Feb 11, 03:26 PM - #Most of the forest marriages lasted a lifetime, hardly your description. Zus personally killed 67 enemies of Jews. A little research would help your future reports become meaningful. Survivers of the Bielski Brothers and their offspring now number between 20,000 to 35,000 Jews.
J. Biels, I think what Jeremy meant in referring to the women as “irrelevant concubines” is that Zwick failed to characterize them as more than that, which is unfortunate.
— Rachel - Feb 12, 07:03 PM - #Joe and J. Biels, I appreciate your respective points, and I thank you for making them. It may also be helpful to remember that film criticism, when done well, should not be misconstrued as a measure of viewer popularity alone, or as implied criticism of a viewer’s personal subjectivity, or as being insensitive to the facts of real human experience.
Clearly, the topic of “Defiance” is one that is especially compelling to those who share tragic personal intimacy with the systematic, monstrous brutalities of hate against the Jewish people during WWII, as well as being of interest to compassionate non-Jews who are also discerning film viewers (suffice to say, non-average viewers both).
For it would appear that Jeremy Konar’s implicit concern is that such a powerful story be told in a more effective way. This, I would gather, is precisely why Konar takes issue with some of the problematic narrative choices in the film. Rather than raising an average viewer’s emotional and moral sensitivity above received cliche (or respecting the non-average viewer’s expectation for a story that does not insult his or her intelligence or fuller breadth of feeling and experience), Konar criticizes the film for its failure to do its subject adequate justice and, more specifically, greater justice to all viewers.
According to Konar, it is the film’s shallow narrative treatment — where matters of moral complexity under extreme human duress are eschewed in favor of the overly simplistic — that, in effect, undercuts the very substance and meaning of the film’s own moral weight.
Indeed, early in his review, Konar touches on the import of the unintended consequences and challenges of living in a post-modern era, one in which billions of viewers are bludgeoned psychologically and emotionally numb by the ubiquitous proliferation of ‘untethered’ violent images (real of fictitious). In that context, Konar’s criticism of “Defiance” is legitimate.
For however well-intended a film may be, if it aims low by exploiting the sensational over a more thoughtful and authentically compelling narrative, then how much integrity does such a film truly have? And what lasting impact can such a film hope to genuinely effect on the average viewer? Film is, after all, a form of mass communication as much as potential art. The story of the Bielski brothers and the larger Jewish community of which they were a part — like all stories of human courage, dignity and endurance in the face of unconscionable horror and genocidal injustice — VERY MUCH DESERVES AND REQUIRES sensitizing, rather than de-sensitizing, treatment. Perhaps, one day, this story will find the film it
— M. Miyagawa - Feb 16, 11:29 PM - #(and all audiences) better deserve.