Samuel, Lockton and I drove out to Moreno Valley, in a misty rain, to see "Defiance" tonight--an Ed Zwick production ("Glory"), starring Liev Schreiber and Daniel Craig, playing the part of the Bielski brothers of Navahrudak, or more broadly, Belarus. This was a wooded country east of Poland that felt the Nazi boot in 1941. Somehow, twelve hundred Jews gathered together under their leadership and survived the Slavic winters in the forest--fending off cold, hunger, and internal bickering; they killed Nazis, and Nazi sympathisers, in the process. I particularly liked one partisan scene where a Nazi motorcycle rider is gulleted by a rope strung across the highway.
My Greek father-in-law told me stories about resistance fighters taking over an Nazi ammuntion dump, with flintlock muskets, so the odds of beating "insurmountable" opposition rang true. Victory goes to those who want to win--not necessarily those who have the best toys.
Normally, Hollywood paints Russian partisans as friendly Reds, but the record is just too obvious to ignore anymore. Russian communists were no better than their Tzarist ancestors. They were willing participants in the pograms, and they are depicted here as drunken brutes, who accept Jewish soldiers by way of expediency. Communist culture, no matter how collectivist it seemed on the surface, was just another means of disbursing Tsarist goodies to the party faithful, and "Defiance" doesn't blink on this front.
Good for Mr. Zwick.
But Zwick is a coward on the greater, more tangible canvas of life in this mercilessly current and immediate world. When Debbie Schlussel asked him why he hasn't depicted modern Israelis as the victims of Nazi jihadists, he punted--big time.
History is, most certainly, an antidote against evil...but pity the poor truth-seeker who wants to learn something from it.
It takes a real man to apply precedent where it is appropriate, and we have very few real men in Hollywood anymore.
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