Defiance (2008)
Bedford Falls Company
d. Edward Zwick; pr. Pieter Jan Brugge, Edward Zwick; scr. Clayton Frohman, Edward Zwick; book. Nechama Tec; ph. Eduardo Serra; m. James Newton Howard; ed. Steven Rosenblum; cast. Daniel Craig, Liev Schreiber, Jamie Bell, Alexa Davalos, Allan Corduner, Jodhi May (137 mins)
Defiance is the latest film from Edward Zwick who last summer helmed Leonardo DiCaprio in the smash hit Blood Diamond.
As evident in Defiance as in that adventure, and indeed much of Zwick’s work since essaying terrorism on American soil long before 9-11 in The Siege, is the director’s socio-political criticism, here being a rationalist reaction to the dynamics of faith in World War Two. Indeed, Defiance functions as a revisionist, rationalist appropriation of Holocaust mythology, echoing Spielberg’s Schindler’s List as all modern Holocaust cinema must inevitably do but to vastly different ends: for where Spielberg sought a benevolent Nazi to be the saviour of the Jewish faith, Zwick intends his saviours to be also Jewish, but rationalists wholly unencumbered by any Judaic faith.
While the script is mawkish and maudlin at times, not aided by an obvious violin score that seems stridently sentimental, Defiance is an intriguing look at resilient humanity in crisis. For Zwick - when confronted by the atrocities of the Nazis, human nature must realize that it is its own pathological depths (and heights) which must be surmounted and that any concept of a benevolent or interventionist God is irrelevant. For Zwick and for an increasing number of filmmakers, the Nazi persecution of the Jews is precisely the historical event that proves the non-existence of God and the dangerous absurdity of organized religion. Few films have been as openly systematic in their renouncement of religion in favour of secular humanist principles as Defiance – indeed, Zwick here sees Rationalism as the inherent factor in the survival of the fittest in his daring re-appropriation of Holocaust mythology.
The film’s survivalist intent is clear throughout in the depictions of two brothers (Daniel Craig and Leiv Schreiber) who flee the Nazi onslaught into the woods where they are soon joined by a ragtag group of survivors. The brothers are Jewish in as much as they are part of a cultural heritage – neither of them expresses nor evidences any faith although Craig has a begrudging respect for the token Rabbi.
In short, though Jewish by definition, they are rationalist-survivalists. Schreiber especially early rejects Biblical principle, adopting a socially Darwinist survival of the fittest principle in urging Craig not to bring in any more refugees. But Craig’s humanistic sense of responsibility for those worse off than him prevails and he establishes a makeshift community in the woods, which Schreiber departs in order to fight with the Soviet partisans, whose Communist party temporarily offers him some solace from the humanist maelstrom around him.
DANIEL CRAIG INTERVIEW
It is here that the contrast between the two brother’s humanism is telling. Craig’s humanism leads to a responsibility for the community – it is paternalistic. Schreiber’s humanism is morally relativist – he seeks to avoid becoming like them even though he is capable of killing as cold-bloodedly as they do. Both brothers face challenges because of their choices and Schreiber in particular must face a final reckoning over where his loyalty to his brother and people really stands. Indeed, Schreiber returns partly out of loyalty to the Jewish cultural identity (that is his burden more so than his birthright and is something he resents for its religious implications) but partly out of a survivalist rationale once he sees that the Communist partisans will readily leave the Jews to die in making their escape. Thus, allegorically Defiance dramatizes the separation and reconciliation of Jewish community responsibility and moral relativism in secular humanist leadership rather than the re-establishment of any Jewish religious practice.
Like the Tom Cruise film Valkyrie before it, Defiance begins with a clear allusion establishing the religious justification for the Third Reich – in Valkyrie it was the oath all officers must take to the Fuhrer above God and in Defiance it begins with Leni Riefenstahl-like imagery paralleling Hitler to God in the Nazi legacy of iconography.
Like Valkyrie, this is a rationalist appropriation – the reconfiguring of the Nazi regime as emblematic of religious (Christian) Totalitarianism. Survival against the Nazis becomes a metaphor for the resistance against religious Totalitarian oppression – hence the parallel treatment of the Rabbi in this film. Far from a humble figure worthy of humane respect as in Schindler’s List, the Rabbi here is a conceited Theist who realizes that he – and his religion – are utterly helpless and who willingly puts his trust in the rationalist Craig. The Rabbi’s final boast that he sees Craig as being sent from God is clearly laughable.
This relationship between Craig and the Rabbi is an intriguing one and the key to the film’s religious thesis – the Rabbi’s final belief that Craig has been sent by God to save them is dismissed as nonsense by both Craig and Zwick, who answers the Rabbi’s plea to save God’s chosen people with a Nazi tank. God has deserted the Jewish people: their belief in clinging to Theist faith is seen as dangerously absurd, ridiculous even. The survivor-community in the woods soon begins to restructure itself along the lines of established social rituals – men and women take forest wives and husbands in special mock marriage ceremonies excusing their lustful urges – but these rituals soon conflict the needs of survival. Zwick makes clear the rationale behind these relationships for the most part – as only the men are armed, the women need to prostitute themselves in order to be protected while in the camp – hardly a divine marriage despite the religious ceremony attending it. All social structures and rituals here – symbolized by the forest marriage - are beget by survivalist necessity and subvert the legitimate religious social institutions they are based on – for Zwick, the forest community is a parody of a Jewish community doomed to failure as long as it clings to its much-vaunted sense of “community”, the view Schreiber easily rejects but Craig clings to.
Just as the community enacts a marriage to traditional folk music, Zwick intercuts the Schreiber partisan assault against the Germans, contrasting the passive resistance of survival with the active resistance of partisan reprisal. But, the safe little community under God that the Rabbi insists should be the case is destined for destruction – any appeal to God’s grace for protection is here answered by the Nazi war machine.
In this way, the unresolved question lingers through Defiance – where was God during this treatment of his supposed chosen people? Indeed, the absence of God except through the wickedest of ironic reminders of His non-existence is stressed in this film’s final reformation of a community. Only after purging themselves of religious faith, traditional cultural ritual and accepting the leadership of the rationalist brothers is this Jewish community allowed to survive, making the film a decided Rationalist allegory of Holocaust mythology. Thus, director Zwick suggests a Jewry borne of World War Two that shares a common cultural ancestry but, based on the experience of the War, has lost any religious relevance except as analogy.
Indeed, Old Testament Biblical analogy recurs throughout Defiance, the most obvious being the final parallel between Craig leading the Jews away from the Nazi onslaught to Moses against the Israelites. But again, the parallel is on the basis of a Rationalist renouncement of Jewish religion – Craig leads his people to a marsh only to realize that this God will not clear the waters like he did for Moses at the Red Sea to escape Pharaoh. Indeed, it is dogged survivalist persistence rather than faith that saves lives – those of faith are here helpless, followers who must be led by the righteous Rationalist shepherds: such is the concluding message of Defiance. In that, Defiance fits neatly into an emerging body of work in contemporary American film which sees a Rationalization of Holocaust cinema. Beginning with Valkyrie, this new genre – what might be termed Nazi Humanism – reaches back to Roman Polanski’s The Pianist and embraces such as Good, The Reader and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, the latter of which being equally condemnatory towards Theist belief.
Correspondingly, Zwick structures the film as a series of moral encounters, each of which – beginning with the morally relativist assertion that far from “thou shalt not kill” that it is perfectly acceptable to kill in a given set of circumstances such as this. Zwick uses the Holocaust as a symbolic setting for the struggle between secular humanism and religious Theism and finds evidence of both human heroism and human pathology that simply cannot be accounted by any faith in God.
Indeed, the faith in God is both the dangerous fallacy behind the Totalitarian oppression of humanity (the Nazis) and the simplistic escapism that engenders passivity instead of resistance and self-assertion. There is little room for Theism by the end of Defiance and Zwick’s ironic plea for a Rationalist Jewish cultural identity is an intriguing one, although one sadly not supported by the growth of Zionism after World War Two, which this film chooses not to address.
