Rescue Dawn

Anybody game for another round of "4 million bottles of beer on the wall"?

Werner Herzog’s résumé in the past six years has consisted exclusively of documentaries (as fictionalized as many of them are); most of them are so superb—I named Grizzly Man the best film of 2005—that it is easy to forget how good he is at utilizing actors to create rousing and gripping cinema.

Herzog’s most recognized fictions are his feverish jungle epics, in which half-crazed and starving protagonists are contrasted against the beautiful, sweltering wilderness. This is rightfully so—many of his best films do feature the jungle—but remember: Herzog is also the man who directed one of the greatest film performances of all time, Klaus Kinski as the title character in Aguirre, the Wrath of God. Watching comparable performances in Rescue Dawn made me realize how much I have missed Herzog the storyteller, who masterfully uses actors placed under extreme circumstances to create a gripping narrative. In this case, Herzog depends on his actors entirely, and offers little cinematic sentiment outside of their developing relationships and increasing exigency to escape from their captors. The film is stunning in its narrative simplicity.

An example, midway through Rescue Dawn: Two American POWs, a marine played by Steve Zahn and pilot played by Christian Bale, talk quietly in a Vietnamese prison camp in the jungles of Laos. Both are starving, delirious, and haggard. Zahn, as Duane, asks Bale, playing Dieter, why he decided to join the Air Force. Dieter’s eyes light up, and he proceeds to recount a lengthy event from his childhood in Berlin—how an American bomber flew so close to the rooftops that the pilot literally made eye contact with a young Dieter before zooming off into the horizon. The brief moment had such a profound effect on the future German-immigrant-turned-volunteer that, as he recounts, “For the rest of my life, I always knew that little Dieter needed to fly.” That he was shot down on his first mission out does not seem to be a deterrent in his dream to take to the skies again; we learn later that he will survive countless other crashes yet always return to the air. From the determined, convincing look in Bale’s eyes, we can believe it.

I think about how so many other filmmakers, keenly aware that they were producing a war epic, would have cued to some sort of flashback with CGI effects and soaring instrumentals. I cannot imagine that Herzog, one of the most prolific and celebrated of all filmmakers, would have needed to overcome many hurdles in procuring the budget required for such a scene. Instead, the director makes a much bolder move—he relies upon the ability of his actors to create the images for us, and he patiently rests his camera of Bale’s face and lets him tell his story. Such methods have been used before in other great films (My Dinner with André is the most obvious example, also Morgan Freeman’s café monologue in Million Dollar Baby), but its effect here makes it seem new once again: Fond memories, combined with the dogged determination to maintain their freshness, is what keeps these men going, even as they are pushed farther and farther into madness and despair. We visualize Dieter’s story perfectly as it dances behind his eyes, and we detect that it is an image that has played out in his mind time and time again while he has been in the camp, providing strength in the hope that little Dieter is indeed not finished flying.

This hope of survival is the heart of Rescue Dawn, which has been described as Herzog’s most instantly accessible film in a career of quirky epics with weird characters and often uninterpretable absurdity (remember Stroszek, which ends with a dancing chicken?). I will grant that it is less intimidating than most of his work, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it is Herzog watered down. The film’s protagonist, Dieter Dengler, has been the subject of another Herzog film, a fascinating documentary called Little Dieter Needs to Fly. That film included scenes depicting a wild-eyed Dieter, still clearly traumatized by his encounters in the jungle, revealing his extra stash of dry rice and claiming that he sleeps better at night knowing that he has the goods hidden underneath the floorboards of his house. I would thus say that Dengler fits well within the range of Herzog’s eccentric men who have faced the jungle and emerged with some of its chaos permanently entwined in their soul.

The clearest difference is that other Herzog protagonists are madmen attracted to the jungle’s hostility and are driven madder by the experience; in Dangler’s case, he is a sane man forced into impossible circumstances who goes mad in the jungle but eventually emerges more or less intact. The expectation of rescue and the eagerness to fly again keeps him alive, and it is a hope with which we sympathize. Aguirre, as he floated down the river on his monkey-infested raft, had hopes too—of ruling the lost city of El Dorado and eventual world domination. Dengler’s humanity ultimately makes Rescue Dawn easier to infer, but this nevertheless remains a strictly Herzogian film about madness in the jungle. After watching Herzog’s sci-fi/documentary Wild Blue Yonder, where the director finally admits that a sort of harmony remerges from his much-contemplated chaos, it is not difficult to see such a penetrable, likable protagonist as the next logical step in his jungle series. Perhaps Herzog has finally grown less pessimistic.

In any case, whatever potential the jungle has to draw great performances out of actors inhabiting it, Herzog has found it and successfully utilizes it time and time again. Rescue Dawn is not a war film, and for much of its running time, it is barely an adventure movie either. Until the third act, it is primarily a chronicle of daily life in a Vietcong prison camp and the interactions between the diverse prisoners as their chances of survival grow bleaker and bleaker. Like other Herzog pictures, it is often difficult to draw the line between fact and fiction—the movie was shot in the sordid, sultry mountains of Thailand, and the actors really do look like they’re starving to death, so deciphering between their acting and their real suffering is basically pointless: When Dieter, Duane, and Gene (Jeremy Davies, in a performance that I want to speculate is a lock for a Best Supporting Actor, except I’m always wrong) sit around a table eating bugs and fantasizing about the contents of their refrigerators, their eyes and bellies are so sunken into their bones that I hereby vow to feed these guys something if I ever meet them, just on principle.

More than anything else, Rescue Dawn is a film about human beings’ link to communication as their key life-force, when food, water, freedom, and sanity slowly melt away. Such interaction is often funny, sometimes tragic, and always true. The enemy, with their various torture techniques and dehumanizing prison environment, simply cannot take away these men’s ability to converse with one another. Yet Herzog is also smart enough not to demonize the Vietcong either. In their own way, the Vietcong are also trapped in this prison, condemned to starvation while they watch over prisoners who, in another lifetime, could have been their friends. Their contact with the prisoners is not always unpleasant; they sometimes allow for extra rations and allow the captives to steal toothpaste. When the guards finally formulate a plan to march Dieter and the others into the jungle to kill them so they can go home, it is hard to blame them—they are all miserable and without food, and we get the feeling that they consider this decision to be partly an act of mercy. Neither do we blame Gene for being so reluctant to go along with Dieter’s escape plan: “The jungle is the real prison,” he points out, and entering there seems just as much a death sentence as springing an attack on their captors. All of these motivations are dealt with in raw discussion between prisoners, who all look into the jungle and see different things—Gene a slow death, Duane a temporary relief, and Dieter a chance. Such scenes make us weary for these gentlemen, and Herzog directs their conversations with a clear sense of sympathy and urgency.

Once we get into the final act, about Dieter and Duane’s escape into the jungle, we are treading in familiar Herzog territory, and followers of his work will instantly pick up on his use of soundtrack and quiet, surreal wilderness images to inform the characters’ motivation. The New Age band Popol Vuh creates a disquieting mood that accentuates the long journey of Dieter and Duane into safety; longtime Herzog fans will know that they also scored Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo, and other seminal works by the director. We sense that the music has always been a part of the desolation of every jungle in the world, as it blends so naturally into the surroundings of Herzog’s films.

More crucial, however, is the way that Herzog plainly allows the events in the jungle to speak for themselves by employing the established relationships of the characters: When tragedy strikes unexpectedly and forces Dieter to carry on alone, the earlier conversations between he and Duane fill in the emotional gaps and inform us of the emotional destruction that has occurred. Again, I think of how other filmmakers would have dealt with this key scene, which is the turning point for Dieter’s quest for freedom in that it presents the greatest challenge to his hope for survival. No doubt they would have used slow motion or stronger reaction shots to highlight the actions of the men’s aggressors. But Herzog shoots the scene as straightforwardly as possible and lets Bale and Zhan react to it unsentimentally. The devastation is what it is; Herzog does not linger, but instead follows it up with a quiet, simple scene in which Dieter is forced to move on regardless, without the benefit of reflection. The weariness in Bale’s face—the subtly of his performance—is sufficient to make our hearts and bones ache for his loss.

The eventual rescue—not a spoiler if you’ve read the title—is also handled straightforwardly without much sentiment: That he is finally being saved from this terrible jungle is enough, and Dieter is too weary to rationalize his salvation, except that he doesn’t have to be in the jungle anymore. Then a curious thing happens: The denouement, in which Dieter is heralded as a hero by the crew of his aircraft carrier, seems to wander in from another movie, with a dramatic score and slowed down shots of crewmen carrying Dieter around on their shoulders. These scenes are my least favorite, because they upset the otherwise minimalist style of the film and rely more heavily on Hollywood sentiment that Herzog has otherwise avoided. It becomes less about the performances and the jungle and more about unlikely events that seem to happen only in movies.

But perhaps this is Herzog’s point—are these closing moments a critique of the glamorous Hollywoodization of war? Consider Dieter’s statement to his fellows-in-arms, who ask him to deliver a few inspirational words: “Empty what is full, fill what is empty. If it itches, scratch it.” A less complex, more commercial film would have come up with a more rousing speech to tug on the viewers’ heartstrings. Negative reviews of Rescue Dawn accuse Herzog of failing to make a political statement about the horrors of war, as if such a statement is necessary in a time when more people statistically believe in UFOs than support the Iraq Occupation. But maybe these closing moments, as out of place as they seem, really are a statement, where Herzog gives the audience the typical sentiment that it expects from lesser films and then undercuts it with the words of a man who has just survived a terrible ordeal and has nothing to say about it, except that he is glad to be eating a steak again. In such simplicity lies the truest virtue of man.

Cast:
Christian Bale: Dieter Dangler
Steve Zahn: Duane
Jeremy Davies: Gene

MGM presents a Gibraltar Films production. Written and directed by Werner Herzog. Based on the book Escape from Laos by Dieter Dangler. Rated PG-13, for intense war sequences and torture. Running time: 126 minutes. Original United States theatrical release date: July 4, 2007.