'Defiance': Hollywood washes out a great story - San Jose Mercury News

"These Jews do," comes the prompt reply, and "Defiance," the new film by Edward Zwick, is determined to prove that point.

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Though one of the standard clichés of the Holocaust is that Europe's Jews were exterminated without offering any resistance, historians have gradually uncovered evidence to the contrary, with the Bielskis being the prime case in point. Along with sibling Asael (Jamie Bell), the brothers not only formed a partisan unit that took on the Germans in the heavily wooded areas of what is now Belarus, they created a community in those woods that managed to keep 1,200 Jews alive until the war ended. Zwick, who wrote the screenplay with Clayton Frohman based on a book by Nechama Tec, has been trying to dramatize that story for at least a dozen years. As it appears on screen, "Defiance" has some genuine strengths but also some weaker elements, and these opposing traits battle it out kind of the way the contentious Bielskis fought not only the Germans but also each other.

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