Defiance (2008)

Edward Zwick's Defiance carries itself like a monument, which is fitting, since it was built the way monuments are: with a straight face and a heavy hand. Four Jewish brothers escape the Einsatzgruppen into the Naliboki forest, gather twelve hundred refugees, and spend two years arguing about how much of their humanity to spend on staying alive. The ethnic specificity here is inherent to the subject, not imposed from outside. Jewish actors play Jewish partisans because the story is theirs. There is nothing performative about it.

The screenplay, drawn from Nechama Tec's book, has one volume setting and it is loud. Morality is announced, then announced again. The recurring question, whether a man must become a monster to defeat monsters, is posed so often that the audience could answer it in their sleep. Women appear, and one subplot gives a rape survivor her due, but the camera belongs to the brothers and their rifles. Antisemitism within the Soviet partisan ranks earns a scene, which is history, not messaging. Nothing here concerns the climate, the body, the economy, or the wiring of the brain.

The history, however, has been rearranged. Ampicillin is prescribed two decades before its discovery. A tank battle that never occurred supplies the climax. The camp is more egalitarian than the record allows, and the Polish and Soviet context is quietly excised. This is a picture that means to overturn the myth of Jewish passivity and, in the attempt, invents a few myths of its own. The epilogue mentions a trucking business in New York without a trace of irony. Some legacies do not require a thesis.