Alice Through the Looking Glass: Not such a much

Alice Through the Looking Glass (2016) • View trailer 
3 stars. Rated PG, for fantasy peril
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 5.27.16

This film conclusively demonstrates that it’s extremely difficult — if not impossible — to replicate Tim Burton’s signature brand of whimsy.

Mere moments after having traveled through the looking-glass, Alice (Mia Wasikowska)
clumsily triggers a crisis that "all the king's horses, and all the king's men" will have to
repair. Which is par for the course, for this film's dim-bulb Alice.

It’s not merely a matter of Burton’s directorial finesse; he’s also a shrewd judge of source material, and how it should be shaped. Either he carefully selects equally talented screenwriters, or he’s actively involved in how a script reaches its final draft; either way, the result — time and again — is weirdly droll, oddly endearing and invariably, if improbably, entertaining.

And — here’s the important part — meticulously structured, and consistent within its own fantasy universe.

None of which can be said about Alice Through the Looking Glass. Linda Woolverton’s script is a mess; her slapdash plot begs, borrows and steals from sources as varied as H.G. Wells, Frozen and the Back to the Future trilogy.

James Bobin’s direction is uninspired and lifeless. Somebody apparently thought he’d be right for the job, on the basis of his having helmed the two most recent Muppets movies. At the risk of stating the obvious, human characters need more directorial guidance than Muppets, who get most of their personality from their unseen “muppeteers.” Alice (Mia Wasikowska) and her various co-stars get very little guidance here.

Granted, this sequel to Burton’s Alice in Wonderland looks equally fabulous. Dan Hennah’s production design is opulent, imaginative and richly colorful: no surprise, as he’s a veteran of all three Hobbit chapters. Oscar-winning costume designer Colleen Atwood is a carryover from the first Alice, and her efforts here are equally creative, often amusing and sometimes flat-out beautiful; Alice’s kimono-style outfit is particularly fetching.

And, yes, the special effects are excellent, if overused ... and that’s part of the problem. As just one example, Bobin wastes an awful lot of screen footage with repeated sequences of Alice sailing through the “oceans of time,” and repetition does not make such journeys more interesting. Quite the opposite.

Crimson Peak: The pinnacle of failure

Crimson Peak (2015) • View trailer 
One star. Rated R, for profanity, sexual candor and gory violence
By Derrick Bang

When the mighty fall, they fall hard.

Steven Spielberg and 1941. Michael Cimino and Heaven’s Gate. George Lucas and Howard the Duck. Warren Beatty and Ishtar, Bruce Willis and Hudson Hawk, Kevin Costner and The Postman.

Even after the already strange Lucille (Jessica Chastain, left) starts behaving in a clearly
menacing manner, Edith (Mia Wasikowska) remains blandly complacent, like a lamb
awaiting slaughter. Obviously, this young woman was absent when common sense
was handed out!

And now, Guillermo del Toro and Crimson Peak.

The deliciously moody writer/director/producer’s career has proceeded smoothly along two parallel and somewhat related paths: extravagantly baroque, comic book-style action sagas, as with Pacific Rim and the two Hellboy entries; and splendidly eerie chillers, as with Mimic, The Devil’s Backbone and his Academy Award darling, Pan’s Labyrinth.

Even at their most outrageous — and Pacific Rim really stretched the credibility envelope — you could be certain of one thing: A Guillermo del Toro film wasn’t boring.

Until now.

Crimson Peak isn’t merely boring. It’s leaden, insufferably slow, wearily overblown, monotonous, humdrum and butt-numbingly, makes-you-want-to-scream dull.

At best, it’s a 25-minute Twilight Zone episode s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-d into a plodding 119-minute trial by tedium. But even that comparison gives far too much credit to the sluggish script by del Toro and Matthew Robbins, which feels like an unholy love child spawned by Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and Friday the 13th.

Yep. It’s that clumsy.

Star Mia Wasikowska has made a career, of late, playing tortured young heroines in period and/or “heightened reality” melodramas, from Madame Bovary and Stoker to, yes, the title character in Jane Eyre. I guess del Toro figured that she was the perfect choice to play this film’s Jane Austen-esque Edith Cushing, heroine of the director’s unabashed attempt to re-create the classic Gothic romances of Hollywood’s Golden Age.

With ghosts thrown in, of course. We are, after all, dealing with Guillermo del Toro.

And yes, Wasikowska certainly looks the part of the naïve and overwhelmed young “spinster” at the heart of this story, which echoes and even name-checks Austin, the Brontë sisters and films such as Rebecca and Great Expectations. But although production designer Tom Sanders and art director Brandt Gordon have a field day with their meticulous re-creation of 1901 New York, and particularly the vast gothic mansion in England’s remote hills, this is a classic case of being all dressed up with nowhere to go.

Because the storyline is pathetic in its stupidity, agape with glaring plot holes, and unable to remain consistent even within its own ludicrous premise. This is a classic example of the idiot plot, which is to say that the narrative lurches from one random contrivance to the next, only because each and every character behaves like a total idiot at all times.

Tracks: An incredible journey of the soul

Tracks (2013) • View trailer 
Four stars. Rated PG-13, for dramatic intensity, fleeting profanity and partial nudity
By Derrick Bang

We’ll probably never truly know why 25-year-old Robyn Davidson arrived in central Australia’s Alice Springs in 1975, and then spent two years learning how to train and manage the country’s remarkable wild camels.

No matter how harsh the environment, Robyn (Mia Wasikowska) resolutely rises each
morning and embarks on another daylong trek across the Australian Outback, accompanied
solely by four camels and her faithful dog.

She had endured a childhood marred by disappointment and tragedy — her mother having committed suicide when Robyn was only 11 — so it’s easy to believe that she had personal demons to exorcise, and things to prove to herself.

Nor are we apt to know what then prompted the young woman to embark on an ill-advised solo trek from Alice Springs to where the Indian Ocean lapped against the West Australian coast, accompanied only by four camels and her beloved black dog, Diggity. The 1,700-mile journey across the harsh and unforgiving Australian Outback took nine months, during which she easily could have died any number of times.

Some people embrace such trials for the sheer challenge; as the saying goes, they climb the mountain or cross the desert “because it’s there.” By her own admission, Davidson seems to have undertaken this trip as a journey of personal discovery: a way to become a better version of herself.

“When there is no one to remind you what society’s rules are,” she has said, reflecting back on her journey, “and there is nothing to keep you linked to that society, you had better be prepared for some startling changes.”

The truly remarkable thing is that director John Curran, scripter Marion Nelson and star Mia Wasikowska have managed to bring Davidson’s incredible journey to the big screen with equal emphasis on the glorious, majestically inhospitable Australian Outback itself, and the impact it had on this solitary traveler. Their film is both a beautifully composed glimpse of an often barren and yet beautiful land, and an intimate portrait of an angry young woman trying to find inner peace.

And she is angry, as we first encounter her ... impatient, brittle and quick to take offense, and yet also oddly vulnerable: a duality that Wasikowska conveys quite well. She nails Robyn’s surface contradictions: uncomfortable in the presence of other people, probably to the point of anthropophobia, and yet dependent upon them for jobs, favors and money. And resentful of that same dependence.

And yet when Wasikowska manages one of Robyn’s shy, uncertain smiles, it lights up her entire face: easy to see, then, why she and her unlikely expedition attracted the interest of the National Geographic Society, which agreed to fund her trip in exchange for photographic coverage.

Stoker: A chilling family affair

Stoker (2013) • View trailer 
3.5 stars. Rating: R, for violence, disturbing sexual content, dramatic intensity and brief nudity
By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 3.29.13

In Chan-wook Park’s corrosive view of the universe, blood isn’t merely thicker than water; it positively congeals the connective tissue of inherited moral putrescence.

And nurture doesn’t stand a chance against nature.

India (Mia Wasikowska) loves to play the piano; it's a great way to release tension.
Charles (Matthew Goode) also enjoys the instrument, but his fondness seems more
directed at playing with his niece ... and the resulting duets turn rather creepy.

Park, the South Korean director known for gorgeously stylized but grimly unsettling thrillers such as 2003’s Oldboy and 2009’s weirdly disturbing Thirst, has made an equally disconcerting American debut with Stoker. This new film is gorgeous to look at, with cinematographer Chung-hoon Chung creating captivating magic with every frame, but the on-screen beauty is at odds with the casual rot festering within our three primary characters.

That juxtaposition is intentional, of course, as is the undercurrent of amused detachment that laces every scene in Wentworth Miller’s gleefully nasty script. These characters taunt, torment and torture each other with an élan the Borgias would have admired, and Park orchestrates the mayhem in a manner that essentially dares us to enjoy the depravity right along with them.

Some of the humor is obvious, starting with the connotations raised by Miller’s choice of a family name — Stoker — or the affectionate nod toward Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt, by naming Matthew Goode’s unhinged interloper Uncle Charlie. But we also can’t help chuckling at the enthusiastically carnivorous manner in which Goode tears into his character; rarely has evil been this charming, tempting ... and forbidden.

The film opens as India Stoker (Mia Wasikowska), recently turned 18, stands at the edge of a field, staring intently at something within. She describes herself cryptically via off-camera narration, adding a layer of poetic eloquence to a tableau that already seems vaguely wrong.

The scene shifts to an India who seems slightly younger and significantly more withdrawn; we understand that we have retreated in time, but not too much. This is her 18^th birthday, and she’s indulging in her favorite annual treat: finding the “special” present from her beloved father, who always hides it in a cryptic manner. The gift itself doesn’t matter all that much, and in fact it’s the same every year: a fresh pair of saddle shoes (definitely not an accidental choice on Miller’s part, given the shoes’ striking contrast between black and white).

No, India anticipates the thrill of the hunt, and the knowledge that her father has gone to so much trouble to please her.

Albert Nobbs: Identity crisis

Albert Nobbs (2011) • View trailer
Three stars. Rating: R, and too harshly, for sexuality, fleeting (and chaste) nudity, and occasional period profanity
By Derrick Bang


You’ve seen them at parties, silently sitting or standing in a corner, hoping not to be noticed, praying not to be engaged in conversation.

The quiet ones. The shy ones. The invisible ones.

Knowing little of intimacy, Albert (Glenn Close, right) believes that merely
stating one's intentions can secure a wife and future happiness. But Helen (Mia
Wasikowska) finds little to recommend this "funny little man," and allows
him to "court" her solely so she can request — and receive — expensive
tokens such as fancy boxes of chocolate.

Albert Nobbs is just such an individual, even more so because he’s a butler employed at Morrison’s, an upscale hotel in 19th century Dublin. Aside from fulfilling their responsibilities, wait-staff during this era were expected to remain unnoticed: never speaking unless spoken to, and then generally replying with nothing more than, “Very good, sir.”

But Albert takes such withdrawn silence and polite reserve to an extreme, even when “relaxing” with his fellow servants in the kitchen; although they respect his devotion to duty and attention to detail, most regard him as a “funny little man.” And nobody has crossed the threshold of his tiny room at the end of a hallway in the attic servant’s quarters.

With good reason, for Albert carries a massive secret, the discovery of which could find him dismissed and on the street, where starvation — at this point during Ireland’s history — was all but guaranteed for those without employment of some sort.

“Albert” actually is a woman, passing as a man in order to “enjoy” the greater status accorded the male gender. What began as an act of desperation, 30 years earlier and at the age of 14, has become such a way of life that Albert has become trapped in a prison of her own design.

That time frame is a bit ironic, since star Glenn Close has been intimately involved with this character since starring in a 1982 theatrical production, adapted from the short story “The Singular Life of Albert Nobbs,” by 19th century Irish author George Moore. Close won an Obie Award for her work in the Off-Broadway production; her film career took off that same year, when she co-starred in The World According to Garp.

But she never forgot Albert Nobbs, and no surprise there: He — she — is a fascinating character. The minimalist stage version of this story employed considerable mime, and Close inhabits the role here with balletic precision. Gestures are few, expressions are sparse; we cherish the moments when Albert’s lips flicker into the ghost of a smile, reflecting a secret delight almost never given voice.

Alas, director Rodrigo García’s big-screen adaptation, Albert Nobbs, isn’t nearly as fascinating as its subject. The film is heartbreaking, at times shatteringly sad; an aura of tense expectation hovers over these characters. We expect something dreadful at nearly every turn, starting from the first few moments, when we learn that Albert has carefully saved more than 500 pounds during her years in service; these tips and wages have been recorded carefully in a ledger that is hidden with the money, each evening before bed, beneath a floorboard in Albert’s room.

Nervous anticipation, over what might happen to this treasure that means everything to Albert? Oh, goodness, yes.

Jane Eyre: Deliciously swooning melodrama

Jane Eyre (2011) • View trailer for Jane Eyre
Four stars (out of five). Rating: PG-13, and quite stupidly, for dramatic intensity and a fleeting nude image
By Derrick Bang


Folks who love their romances brooding and gothic will adore director Cary Fukunaga's new take on Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. I haven't seen so much angst and despair — nor so many dismal moors and long-suffering stares — since Merle Oberon chased Laurence Olivier in 1939's Wuthering Heights.

That was sister Emily Bronte's novel, of course, but Charlotte certainly penned an equally memorable saga of tortured love.

Jane (Mia Wasikowska) can't help being attracted to Rochester (Michael
Fassbender), even though she knows the very thought of embarking in a
relationship with the man is impossible, given the divide of their social
stations. But what is love, if not an emotion determined to surmount any
potential obstacle?

I'm frankly surprised, at a time when Jane Austen's books have enjoyed such renewed popularity, that we've not sooner re-visited either or both of the Bronte sisters. To be sure, a typical Austen heroine has more dash and sharp-tongued wit than an average Bronte heroine, but the latter should not be dismissed as silent wallflowers. This new Jane Eyre offers plenty of spirited feminine pluck, thanks both to Mia Wasikowska's sensitive performance and Moira Buffini's impressively nuanced script. The book runs roughly 400 pages, and capturing all that depth in a two-hour film is no small accomplishment; Buffini — who also scripted the charming Tamara Drewe — does a fine job.

Then, too, Michael Fassbender's Edward Rochester just might get swooning female viewers to forget Colin Firth's Mr. Darcy, in 1995's Pride and Prejudice. Fassbender's tempestuous Rochester is a haunted soul for the ages.

Fukunaga's one irritating misstep is the decision to open his film at the story's first climax — the conclusion of the third of this saga's five major acts — and then reveal what came before through a series of lengthy flashbacks. This sort of structural conceit, if employed unnecessarily, bespeaks a director who fears that his audience demands a splashy first scene, in order to settle into the story. That's utter nonsense, particularly given the drama at hand as Bronte's book begins.

Then, too, Fukunaga compounds the error later on, by showing us those opening scenes again, when Buffini's screenplay catches up to them. What, did they think we had forgotten so quickly?

That pesky annoyance aside, we quickly settle into the unhappy tale of poor Jane, orphaned as a child and initially raised by her Aunt Sarah (the hissably waspish Sally Hawkins, who recently starred in Made in Dagenham), who despises the girl. As soon as decorum permits, Jane — a heartbreaking performance, at this early age, by Amelia Clarkson — is shipped off to the foreboding Lowood School for Girls.

Additionally, Aunt Sarah makes it clear that "it" — not "she" — will remain at Lowood during all holidays. Needless to say, this is the sort of institution where the staff appears to live quite well on the tuition fees, while the scores of young girls must make do with cold rooms, minimal clothing and meager meals.

We generally associate this sort of hard-luck orphan with Charles Dickens ... and, in truth, Oliver Twist didn't have it any harder.

The Kids Are All Right: Balancing Act

The Kids Are All Right (2010) • View trailer for The Kids Are All Right
Four stars (out of five). Rating: R, for profanity, nudity, sexual candor and drug references
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 7.30.10
Buy DVD: The Kids Are All Right • Buy Blu-Ray: The Kids Are All Right [Blu-ray]


Some relationship dramedies derive their humor neither from one-liners nor slapstick merriment, but what could be termed the "squirm factor."

Our chuckles are genuine but nervous; we find somebody's flustered behavior both amusing and embarrassing ... and wincingly familiar. We're constantly waiting for some ax to fall, and that also turns into jittery laughter. The closer the script cuts to the bone — the more these characters become persuasively real to us — the more we laugh at their foolish conduct.

Paul (Mark Ruffalo, right) isn't sure what to expect when he's invited to share a
meal with Nic (Annette Bening, left) and Jules (Julianne Moore), whose children
 he fathered, years ago, thanks to sperm donation. He has only just met the teens
in question -- Laser (Josh Hutcherson) and Joni (Mia Wasikowska) -- and shares
their desire that he become more involved with their lives. But long-established
family dynamics are tricky, and the guarded undercurrent present during
this dinner is bound to erupt, sooner or later. 

Mostly because it ain't us making such a blindingly idiotic mess of our lives.

Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are All Right cuts very close to the bone. It's therefore quite funny at times, and also heartbreaking at other moments. Cholodenko's script, co-written with Stuart Blumberg, is achingly, painfully credible; the set-up is reasonable, the dialogue and human responses pretty much as we'd expect from the folks next door, or down the street ... or in our own bedroom.

The film also is anchored by powerful, Academy Award-worthy performances, particularly those from stars Annette Bening and Julianne Moore. They truly inhabit their characters, to the degree that I frankly forgot I was watching actresses in a movie. As happens only rarely, the actresses completely vanish into their roles.

Nic (Bening) and Jules (Moore) have been together for years, and have fallen into patterns that'll be recognized by couples enduring middle-age ennui. They take each other for granted a bit too much, then over-compensate with ostentatious displays of affection ... often while others can watch and therefore validate the gesture.

Nic's the bread-winner: a control freak, somewhat hyper-critical and certainly hyper-sensitive, and prone to a few too many glasses of wine. Jules is loosie-goosie, more inclined to ride the shifting winds of fickle impulse. She probably absorbs more snarky remarks — delivered with waspish precision by Bening — than she dishes out.

That Evening Sun: Simmering tension

That Evening Sun (2010) • View trailer for That Evening Sun
3.5 stars (out of five). Rating: PG-13, for battlefield violence and profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 3.11.10
Buy DVD: That Evening Sun • Buy Blu-Ray: That Evening Sun [Blu-ray]


Some films get the bulk of their dramatic heft from the interactions between central characters; others take a subtler approach, building mood and atmosphere into a sort of cinematic tone poem that evokes an emotional response with a minimum of dialogue.

That Evening Sun is just such a film.

Abner Meecham (Hal Holbrook) is surprised to find his home occupied by a
woman (Carrie Preston) and her barely dressed daughter, Pamela (Mia
Wasikowska), but he has an even nastier jolt in store: the male presence in this
family, who turns out to be a much-despised acquaintance.

Although fueled by star Hal Holbrook's faultless performance as an octogenarian not about to go quietly into the good night, director/scripter Scott Teems — adapting William Gay's short story, "I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down" — isn't all that concerned with conventional storytelling.

Teems establishes place first: the dilapidated, financially distressed, suffocatingly hot purgatory of a tiny Tennessee community well on its way to becoming a ghost town. Not since 1981's Body Heat has the sweat-stained discomfort of oppressive humidity been so convincingly caught on camera; Teems and cinematographer Rodney Taylor have quite a talent for weaving random images — humming insects, sun-baked wood, shimmering roads — into a tapestry of weary discomfort.

The events detailed in this setting are more a random snapshot than a linear narrative with a fixed introduction and conclusion, and that's appropriate; Gay's prose has been compared to William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor and Cormac McCarthy, for the way it sets a mood more than anything else. Indeed, Gay dedicated this short story to McCarthy.

Teems' film also is unsettling because of the way it works against our expectations; the few characters in this story aren't black and white, but more shades of gray.

One thing becomes clear, though, fairly quickly: Nobody is apt to wind up happy when these events play out.

Alice in Wonderland: It's a wonder!

Alice in Wonderland (2010) • View trailer for Alice in Wonderland
Four stars (out of five). Rating: PG, for monster-battling violence
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 3.5.10
Buy DVD: Alice in Wonderland • Buy Blu-Ray: Alice in Wonderland [Blu-ray]


The knowledge that a new version of Alice in Wonderland would involve director Tim Burton, star Johnny Depp and scripter Linda Woolverton — who worked on Disney's Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King and Mulan — seemed a match made in heaven.

I couldn't imagine a trio of artistic sensibilities better suited to Lewis Carroll's wildly imaginative and sneakily subversive classics.

Alice (Mia Wasikowska, center) approaches her destiny -- to face the
Jabberwocky on a field of battle -- as the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) and
White Queen (Anne Hathaway) offer words of encouragement, in Tim Burton's
gleefully opulent handling of Alice in Wonderland.

And, indeed, this re-booted Alice in Wonderland is an eye-popping delight: a perfect showcase for Burton's zany visual panache, Depp's whimsically eccentric performance style and Woolverton's blend of fairy-tale affectations with modern sensibilities.

Burton's film isn't actually an adaptation of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland; it's a mash-up of that 1865 novel and its 1872 sequel, Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There, along with the nonsense poem — "Jabberwocky" — that is part of the latter book. Additionally, this interpretation of Alice takes place a bit later, after our heroine has matured into a young woman on the verge of marriage, who suffers from a recurring dream that involves all sorts of strange creatures from a dimly remembered realm.

This changes the story dynamic, transforming our protagonist from a mostly helpless little girl — who merely witnesses assorted strange events — into a resourceful, kick-ass action heroine who takes charge of her own destiny.

Not that she starts out that way. Even this more mature Alice, a practical young woman, spends a good deal of time believing that she's having another bad dream, instead of actually living it.

Events begin amid the boorish British aristocracy, where Alice (Mia Wasikowska, appropriately plucky) — having lost the father she loved dearly, and therefore forced into unpalatable options — receives a proposal of marriage from a titled lout not fit to lace up this intelligent, high-spirited young woman's corset. (Not that she believes in wearing such a pointless clothing accessory.)

Defiance: Fighting back

Defiance (2008) • View trailer for Defiance
3.5 stars (out of five). Rating: R, for war violence and profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.22.09
Buy DVD: Defiance • Buy Blu-Ray: Defiance [Blu-ray]

Daniel Craig's steely gaze, given more intensity by his impossibly blue eyes, often snatches the focus from the grim events depicted in Defiance.

Director Edward Zwick (Glory, Blood Diamond) obviously recognizes the power of Craig's noteworthy feature; the camera certainly cuts to the man's eyes often enough. Maybe too often: It's one of a few "movie star hiccups" that occasionally pulls us out of the otherwise fascinating story being told in this WWII drama.

Although believing that their forest encampment is sufficiently concealed, Nazi
planes spot them anyway, forcing Tuvia Bielski (Daniel Craig, center) to help
his many Jewish followers flee from a rain of bombs. Unfortunately, the
bombers are but one aspect of a campaign to flush all these people out into the
open, where infantry can cut them down...

2008 was a rich year for Nazi and Holocaust dramas, particularly because most delved into events and psychological readings never before brought to the big screen. As I mentioned when reviewing director Stefan Ruzowitsky's The Counterfeiter last spring, I remain fascinated by the number of compelling "new" stories — not really new at all, of course; merely unheralded until now — that continue to emerge from that most horrible time in German/European history.

Defiance is no different. Zwick and co-scripter Clay Frohman, working from events recounted in Nechama Tec's nonfiction book of the same title, eschew the usual cliché of Jews as complacent victims waiting in ghettos and death camps, to focus instead on a group of resourceful Eastern European civilians who fought back: courageously, cleverly and for the duration of the war.

It's the saga of largely unsung heroes Tuvia (Craig) and Zus (Liev Schreiber) Bielski, who grew up with younger brother Asael (Jamie Bell) on a family farm in Stankevich, in what now is Belarus but in the 1940s — by which time all three were adults — was part of the Soviet empire. Tuvia and Zus, both imposing and charismatic, were known as troublemakers with an aversion to authority.

They therefore were targeted for quick execution when the Nazis invaded in June 1941. But while the German SS and collaborating Stankevich police killed the Bielskis' parents and other family members — including Tuvia's wife and their infant daughter — all three brothers escaped to the local woods, a vast, thickly overgrown area they had known since childhood.

Determined at first to form a partisan group to fight the Nazi occupation, Tuvia and Zus instead wound up gathering any and all fleeing Jews into their ever-expanding encampment. With Tuvia as leader, the group embraced the commitment to save as many Jews as possible: men, women, children, elders ... everybody.

And here's the amazing part: Until the publication of Frohman's book, nobody knew much of anything about the Bielskis or the astonishing degree to which their ambitious plan succeeded.