'Our revenge is to live.'

Rating: 8/10 (6 June 2009)

This motto serves to sum the feelings of the Bielski brothers as they escape the horrors of the Nazi extermination of Jews in 1941. Adapted from Dr. Nechama Tec's book DEFIANCE: THE BIELSKI PARTISANS by director Edward Zwick and Clayton Frohman this film is as much about family devotion as it is about extended family. It is a touching story of survival under the most impossible conditions and a story of heroism that is far too unknown among even scholars of the WW II period.
Set in 1941 DEFIANCE introduces four brothers of the Bielski family (the parents have been victims of the Nazi Final Solution in Belorussia) - the compassionate brother Tuvia (Daniel Craig), angry and reactive brother Zus (Liev Schreiber), and the younger brothers Asael (Jamie Bell) and Aron (George McKay). In response to the war the brothers find refuge in the forest where gradually they encounter other Jews hiding from the Nazis and through thoughtful and clever means form an ever enlarging community where their extended family is fed and cared for and prepared with weapons stolen from the Nazis to defend their existence and protect them from being placed in the death camps. The film is a series of encounters with the enemy but it is also a very touching collection of stories of survival in the wilderness by such concepts as allowing men to have 'forest wives', pitting the religious teachings of a professor Haretz (Allan Corduner) and the pure intellectualism of writer Isaac Malbin (Mark Feurstein), and other interludes of interpersonal coping with tragedy.
The cast is a fine one with Liev Schreiber the most convincing, but with a fine new role type for Daniel Craig. There is an odd mixture of accents from each of the actors - each trying to imitate the Russian sound. But in the end the viewer is left with a sense of respect and even awe at the courage and discipline of outcasts surviving a hideous nightmare, simply by staying alive. Grady Harp