Defiance movie review

Yet another movie. After a two day break, back in the theater for Defiance. Again, the fact that I sat still for more than two hours and didn’t squirm compliments the flick.

It’s not actually a Holocaust film; more properly it’s a buddy film, more about the necessity of community and no man is an island than death and war. The setting is the Holocaust, and when people are being exterminated I can’t say it’s unimportant, but it’s not the main thrust of the film.

A few years ago (I think five) Edward Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz (director and producer of this movie) gave a lecture at the Getty in LA and showed The Man Who Would Be King, and said it was perhaps their favorite movie / biggest influence. Defiance follows a similar form, with the friends (brothers in this case) beginning together, having a falling out, going through epic complications and travails, then finding a somewhat satisfying resolution and perhaps self-knowledge. It’s a journey with a pair of regular guys who step up and discover their inner hero (more remarkable because their people are usually accountants / teachers / i.e. cerebral and docile; there is an explicit distinction between City and Country as well).

I have high standards for my boys Zwick and Herskovitz, and I gotta say this wasn’t as good as I wanted. The first reel was actually bad, but I understand the difficulty of starting in the middle (a four-hour film wasn’t an option) and balancing enough backstory with beginning the action. After I got into it, the movie was paced well (Zwick and Herskovitz are better than most at pacing/editing), hit all the right notes, but I wasn’t moved by it. It was a good movie, well made, certainly worth spending time watching, but not required viewing. “It was a movie” was my attitude immediately after leaving the theater. My expectation going in was high, which negatively affects my opinion of the movie. There actually wasn’t anything wrong with it, but it didn’t move my like I wanted it to; hypercritical, and actually a big pat on the back for a good, but not great, job.

Special mention: Zwick and Herskovitz are VERY tasteful with violence, and this movie is a clinic in how to show violence without making it violence-porn. A brief shot of a trench full of bodies is shown wide angle and with soft focus, because we don’t need to see corpse closeups to know what it is. All filmakers take note: we know what a gunshot and spattering blood mean. We don’t need slow-mo superduper closeups of disintegrating anatomy and loud squishy crunching sounds which echo. We’re not stupid. We know what violence is. Get on with the MEANING rather than the thing itself. (c.f. Waltz for Bashir which I saw two days ago.)

In fact, ‘tasteful’ is a good adjective for the movie. In lesser hands it would have been crap – excess gore, maudlin shlock, or too many action sequences. The story itself is plenty dramatic enough (based on true!) without going big. Of course Zwick and Herskovitz handled everything tastefully. Classy filmmakers.

Thanks guys!

: P

~ by 4paul on 2009/02/04.