Professor Honora Chapman on “Optimism and
Defiance” – the must-see movie with the modern connection:
Optimism can literally save lives. The new movie Defiance displays an earnest quality in its depiction of over a thousand lives being saved through the hardened optimism and determination of a band of brothers. This earnestness, however, has inspired snark in some reviewers. . . .
[T]hese are odd times, when taking sideways potshots at
Israel during a review of a movie about heroic Jewish resistance to annihilation at the hands of the Nazis, as a few reviewers have done, is considered thoughtful commentary. David Denby . . . delivers a far more intelligent and snark-free assessment of the film forThe New Yorker, one that appreciates the “tactile…rendering” of the forest and catches and creates allusions to other films such as The Godfather and
Munich.
The heroism of the Bielski group depicted in Defiance is born of a gritty, pragmatic optimism backed up by meaningful action.
From David Denby’s review:
One Jewish friend characterized the movie as “Fiddler on the Roof” meets “The Dirty Dozen.” But “
Defiance” is shrewder than that. The picture offers the most moving account we’ve ever had of how an ordinary, rather disagreeable man, challenged and then electrified by catastrophe, grows into a great leader—in this case, a man possessed of an uncanny sense of timing, authority, and force. After the war, Tuvia Bielski spent a quiet decade in
Israel, then moved to
Brooklyn, where he and Zus ran taxi and trucking companies. He was largely uncelebrated in either place—perhaps because some Jews took his success in saving people as a rebuke to their own helplessness. After Tuvia died, in 1987, Nechama Tec rescued him from obscurity, and Edward Zwick and Daniel Craig have now sealed the case for his immortality.
