Untimely defiance

Philip French concludes his review of Defiance, Edward Zwick's movie about the Bielski Partisans (which I mean to see but haven't yet), thus:

But what is most striking is the ruthlessness shown by both Tuvia and Zus [Bielski], who begin by killing Russian collaborators in cold blood, shoot down those who challenge their leadership and end up slaughtering Germans with a glee associated with Hollywood wartime propaganda entertainments.

It took the American cinema quite a time to make pictures like Exodus and Cast a Giant Shadow, which presented Jews fighting for the creation of Israel, but this week is not, I think, the best moment for a picture celebrating them in ruthless, take-no-prisoners mode.

As it seems to me, three different points are conflated here: they concern, in turn, accuracy, 'taste' (for want of a better word), and timing. Whether Defiance is accurate about the ruthlessness shown by Tuvia and Zus Bielski I don't know, but if it is, then there is reason enough for Zwick to have portrayed that ruthlessness without being open to criticism for it - unless he does so in an aesthetically and/or morally brutalizing way. Why, however, a film about events in the 1940s - or, for that matter, the Bielskis, resisting one of the most unrestrainedly merciless of enemies - should be burdened with French's perceptions of what is going on in Gaza at the moment, this is both a mystery and an anachronism. Apart from anything else, those who made the film won't have known, while they were doing so, what was going to be happening in January 2009.