Review – Defiance

One of the biggest questions posed by the Holocaust is “why didn’t anyone fight back?” After all, if you’re going to be butchered anyway, you might as well take a few Nazis with you. Well, the answer is that many people did fight back. But of all the resistance groups, the Bielskis were one of the few that managed to organize a safe haven for refugees. Of course “safe” in occupied Belorussia was a relative thing, as this drama shows. Tuvia (Daniel Craig) organized the community in the forest while his hot-headed brother Zus (Liev Schreiber) joined the partisans to fight the Germans. The production values are Hollywood standard, and the script and acting likewise don’t particularly stand out. But the story alone is sufficiently fascinating to carry the day. Mildly amusing