This film perfectly captures the terror of World War II, the camaraderie involved in creating the Bielski camps and the brutality of the perpetual suffering of the Jewish community during the time of the Holocaust. It’s nearly impossible to watch this film and not sympathize with the characters. While much of this is due to the exceptional filming location (less than one hundred miles from the actual Bielski camps) and the theatrics of the action scenes, it was the acting that gets through to the audience and makes them realize how painful this time was in history. Daniel Craig, Liev Schreiber and Jamie Bell were phenomenal choices to play the Bielski brothers. These are actors that are well known in Hollywood (Daniel Craig, in particular, is known very well for his role as James Bond). It can sometimes be difficult to separate actors from the prolific characters that they portray in other films, however, this was not the case in this film. Daniel Craig truly was Tuvia Bielski; nothing about his acting in this film reminded me of his role in the James Bond films as he perfectly captured the persona of a struggling man during WWII. Schreiber, however, was my favorite character. His character, Zus, was serious when he needed to be and quite comical during certain situations that helped to lighten the mood. His character, regardless of the fact that he separates himself from his brothers, was, in many ways, the reason that the camps lasted as long as they did. The juxtaposition of Asael Bielski’s (Jamie Bell) wedding and Zus Bielski’s first attack on the Nazis with his new militia group was incredibly poetic. The audience gets to see that the wonderful people struggling to survive in the wild are still able to find happiness and while what Zus was doing may not be considered fun to most, he believes that he has found his calling and finds solace in the act of killing Nazis. I believe that this scene accurately sums up the purpose of most of the characters in the film; they are fighting for their own survival as well as the survival of the people around them (and this calling took many forms throughout the film). The amount of research that writers Clayton Frohman, Edward Zwick and Nachama Tec went through in order to perfect the film the way that they did must have been immense. Based on the little research that I’ve done of Tuvia Bielski, it appears that the writers and the director were nearly spot on in introducing his (and his brothers’) incredible story to the world. This film is easily one of my top five favorite war films of all time. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1034303/?ref_=nv_sr_2
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