Defiance (2008 Film) - Response

Response

Defiance received mixed to positive reviews from film critics. Rotten Tomatoes reported that 57% of critics gave the film a positive review based upon a sample of 132, with an average score of 5.8/10. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the film has received an average score of 58 based on 34 reviews.

New York Times critic A. O. Scott called the film "stiff, musclebound." He said that Zwick "wields his camera with a heavy hand, punctuating nearly every scene with emphatic nods, smiles or grimaces as the occasion requires. His pen is, if anything, blunter still, with dialogue that crashes down on the big themes like a blacksmith's hammer." Scott also said the film unfairly implied that "if only more of the Jews living in Nazi-occupied Europe had been as tough as the Bielskis, more would have survived". The review states further that "in setting out to overturn historical stereotypes of Jewish passivity, ...(the film) ends up affirming them."

New Yorker film critic David Denby praised the film, saying that "it makes instant emotional demands, and those who respond to it, as I did, are likely to go all the way and even come out of it feeling slightly stunned." Denby praised the performances in the film, which he described as "a kind of realistic fairy tale set in a forest newly enchanted by the sanctified work of staying alive."

The Times and The Guardian reported some Poles fear "Hollywood has airbrushed out some unpleasant episodes from the story", such as the Bielski partisans' alleged affiliation with those Soviet partisans directed by the NKVD, who committed atrocities against Poles in eastern Poland, including the region where Bielski's unit operated. Gazeta Wyborcza reported six months before the film's release that "News about a movie glorifying have caused an uproar among Polish historians publishing in the nationalist press", who referred to the Bielskis as "Jewish-communist bandits". Other historians have been characterized as being "more cautious", describing the group's banditry as understandable when survival is at stake.

The newspaper commented after the film's release that it "departed from the truth on several occasions", including depicting pre-war Nowogrodek as a Belarusian town where "no one speaks Polish", "there are only good Soviet partisans and bad Germans" and "Polish partisans are missing from the film altogether". Professor Krzysztof Jasiewicz, in an article published in the leading Polish daily Rzeczpospolita, criticized the film for vastly simplifying the historical reality in which it is set and failing to adequately place the events it describes within the complex historical situation during World War II in Eastern Poland.

A review by Armchair General magazine cited the book Women in the Holocaust by Dalia Ofer and Lenore Weitzman, to argue that in reality the Bielskis were less egalitarian than the film suggests, and that "the fighters had the first pick among women for sexual partners."

Zwick responded to the criticism by saying that Defiance is not a simple fight between good and evil. He told The Times in a statement: "The Bielskis weren't saints. They were flawed heroes, which is what makes them so real and so fascinating. They faced any number of difficult moral dilemmas that the movie seeks to dramatise: Does one have to become a monster to fight monsters? Does one have to sacrifice his humanity to save humanity?"

Nechama Tec, on whose book the film is based, stated in an interview with Rzeczpospolita that she was initially shocked by the film, especially by the intense battle scenes, which included combat with a German tank. These battles never occurred in reality: the partisans tried to avoid combat and were focused on survival. She explained this divergence as an adaptation concession producer Edward Zwick made to make the film more thrilling and necessary to obtaining the necessary funding, such being the realities of Hollywood. Nevertheless, after seeing the film a number of times, Tec said that she is liking it "more and more". Zwick said Adolf Hitler sent two German divisions into the forest to search for the partisans and were unable to locate them.

On March 5, 2009 The Guardian reported: "A film starring Daniel Craig about a Jewish underground resistance movement that took on the Nazis has prompted a storm of protest in Poland. Defiance has been booed at cinemas across the country and banned from others because of a local perception that it is a rewriting of history and anti-Polish." On March 11, 2009, the Polish Embassy in London disputed the report, stating: "This embassy has been in touch with Defiance's only distributor in Poland, Monolith Plus, and we have been told that this film has not experienced any form of booing, let alone been banned by any cinemas."

Most reviewers from Belarus criticised the film for a complete absence of the Belarusian language and for the Soviet partisans singing a Belarusian folk song while they would more likely be singing Russian songs. "The word Belarusian is spoken out only three times in the movie", the newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda v Belorussii wrote. Veterans of the Soviet partisan resistance in Belarus criticised the film for inaccuracies. Some reviews, as in Poland, criticised the film for ignoring the Bielski partisans' crimes against the local population.