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February 08, 2009

Defiance: Der Yiddisher Wild Bunch Goes to Lithuania

If you can see only ONE movie with Nazis from the current bonanza, go see "Defiance," about the fighting Bielski brothers. Daniel Craig does a great turn as a partisan leader, with the much quoted line, "Our revenge is to live."

It's a good quote, and the characters back up that let's-live philosophy with heapin' helpings of Jew-on-Jerry revenge scenes. Germans and collaborators are stabbed, bombed, machine-gunned and subject to summary execution. I liked it, I really liked it! One striking scene inside a German police station gets a slow-motion Sam Peckinpah "Wild Bunch" treatment in slow-motion with the blood flying.

In fact, I wish Peckinpah had been around to make this movie. I've got nothing against Ed Zwick, and the movie combines Yiddishkeit and slaughter in an aesthetically pleasing way, but I wish the director had pushed the mayhem even further in a delirious screw-you "Wild Bunch" style. Now that I think about it, the perfect (living) director for this film would have been Paul Verhoeven, whose Black Book was a stunning riot of guns, girls and, ultimately, grisly payback. I saw the film with a Dutch-Jewish friend and we were both mightily impressed.

Meanwhile, in another of the Nazi flick universe, I can't believe "The Reader" got all those Oscar nominations. I found it watchable and uniformly interesting, but my ability to emotionally connect with the angst of chain-smoking Germans is limited. Seeing it on a big screen adds nothing to the experience; bag the theater and wait for the DVD. Its saving grace is the appearance, in a small but crucial dual role, of Lena Olin, who grabbed my imagination in 1988's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being." Hats and undershirts never looked the same after I saw Olin in this movie.

Van | 02/08/09 at 07:59 PM | Categories: Sensual pleasures

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Jeremayakovka | February 10, 2009 05:16 PM

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