Documentary films (sometimes known as actualités) cannot do what Edward Zwick does in Defiance (did in Glory and The Last Samurai):  package a true story combining gorgeous set-ups with flawless cinematography and emotionally diligent, impeccably timed performances.  The winters that the real Bielski brothers spent hiding from the Nazis in the forests of Belarus cannot have looked like Zwick’s film, but rather must have been horrible, cold, dangerous, uncertain, ugly, bitter, life-threatening, stressful.  Defiance makes the winters seem as if the Jews who endured them knew of the impending happy (Hollywood) ending.  All the characters in the film look at Tuvia and Zus Bielski (conscientiously played by Daniel Craig and Live Schreiber, respectively) with the kind of naïve adoring hope that only takes place in implausible fantasies: post-card beautiful woods, 1200 lives saved, music behind the trees, crescendo, roll credits.

Zwick invited the actual adult children of the Bielskis to the set of the film in Lithuania.  He described them in an article in the New York Times (“Shadows of Valiant Ancestors” 12.28.08).  If only he had turned his cameras on them instead.  Footage of their visit, interviews with them and with the surviving Bielski brother might have told a story far closer to the actual story than Defiance can.  Sometimes, words are worth a thousand pictures.

But Hollywood directors such as Zwick don’t routinely work in the documentary form, and it’s unlikely that any documentary filmmakers shot film of Tuvia and Zus Bielski in New York during the immediate aftermath of their service and survival.  All Defiance can be is a well crafted action film with fine performances that seems to inform the filmgoer but actually merely arouses.  Perhaps one day a documentary filmmaker with an interest in the defiance of the “hollywoodification” of history will properly render the actuality of the achievement of the Bielskis; such a film could inform and move an audience in ways that packaging and Defiance cannot quite.

*Mary is a friend, former colleague at The Frost Center, and one of the sharpest folks I know with regard to film and theater in Washington, DC.

My review of the book is here.