surviving the holocaust in slick Hollywood style with occasional power

Rating: 6/10 (18 January 2009)

If you want some part of the world or little story of historical significance blown up to heights of melodrama and typical performance heights that emphasize gobs of emoting in some difficult (but conventional) situations, Edward Zwick is your man. He's not a bad filmmaker, and if anything he's very suited to tell this sort of feel-good/sort-of-feel-bad movie about Jews who band together in the woods to survive with hundreds of other local Polish Jews.
The bond between the three brothers in the story (Daniel Craig, Liev Schrieber, Jamie Bell) is one of the more fascinating parts of the picture, as are the actors performances to greater or lessor degrees. Their varying methods and ways of going about the business of survival and revenge are the most significant thing to keep track of: one, Craig, wants to keep this community of Jewish refugees together and keep out of vengeance, another, Schreiber, wants only to get Nazi blood, and another, Bell, falls for the nice girl and becomes a leader later on in the film.
Significant because, frankly, it's one of the only things in the picture that comes across with conviction and certainty that doesn't feel like a checklist (save, of course, for that "twist" ending where Zus comes to the aide of Tuvia that has been done in more movies than I can think of, however minorly rousing it is). Because we're in this Bielski resistance camp for the bulk of the picture the drama focuses on little things, little occurrences and strife and the power games between other members in the group (or one member) as opposed to what the film appears to be in the trailer as a riveting action movie.
The sad thing is whenever there's action, with a couple of exceptions like a simple revenge killing early in the story by Tuvia, it's filmed in that dreadful whiplash framework where the camera is going up and around and it's all in this cheesy slow-motion; it's either that or the now oft-used since Saving Private Ryan "seeing-things-in-slow-motion-while-thirty-seconds-deaf" moment with Tuvia. What drama there is around this should be more riveting but comes down to details that don't have ultimately much bearing on the plot (such as a pregnancy), when it should be squarely about the bare-bones nature of survival in the woods in the winter. There's some of that, which is all well and good, but not enough, and certainly not with the kind of daring that these real people being depicted deserve.
Some terrific performances, as usual in a Zwick production (the kind that are begging for recognition at awards season but never really get to the top of the pops), and some bits that made me feel happy (i.e. the woman confronted by the wolf). It's also too long, too one note and an ending that feels too easily of the up-note. Defiance is another in a stretch of holocaust/WW2 set films that have been (un)intentionally flooding theaters recently, from indie (Adam Resurrected) to big-budget Hollywood (Valkyrie). This is neither the best nor the worst; I imagine those wanting a lesser dosage of Craig as a bad-ass Jew after his much better turn in Munich may look here.