Rescue Dawn (2007)
Rescue Dawn (2007)
Written and Directed by Werner Herzog
The enigma of Werner Herzog returns, this time for his second *fictional* film in the last fifteen years, and a fictionalized version of a documentary he made a decade ago at that. Herzog, presumably drunk on the unexpected success of Grizzly Man, and some Hollywood producers and crew (also presumably drunk enough) to finance and make the film have all (knowingly and unknowingly) decided to give America a giant ironic birthday cake this July 4 (the official release date of the film). Adapted from the *true* events that made up his 1997 documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly, Rescue Dawn is the story of Dieter Dangler, a (German-born) American pilot who gets shot down in the early stages of the Vietnam war. Played by the unevenly British (and again emaciated) Christian Bale, Dangler survives the crash only to be captured and held prisoner in Laos with some other delusional fellows (a surprisingly effective Steve Zahn, and a not so surprisingly overacted Jeremy Davies, once again doing his Charles Manson).Rescue Dawn has all the makings of a quintessential Herzog film: the harsh jungle, savagely violent natives, Caspar David Friedrich-esque imagery, a man driven by obsession -- but color me confused on this one, it felt more like someone doing their damnedest Herzog impression. Technically, it would be unfair to criticize Herzog for breaking from the mold he so carefully (and sloppily) made throughout his career, which was my first reaction to the film ("What? Where is the futility? The death?"). However the more I dissect it, it isn't that Herzog has moved away from the 'impossible-dream' driven stories that made him famous, but it's that he has turned down the knob from 10 to 1 on the classic Herzogian irony and futility scale. All the elements remain intact, but it's all a bit watered down -- though I'll give him credit for making a film that is destined to be misunderstood by just about everyone who sees it (especially Americans). Despite the setting and circumstances, the film has very little to do with Vietnam (Herzog has never been concerned with social reality), yet Dieter's "success" in survival and escape has everything to do with Herzog making an underhanded statement about America and the Vietnam war. Quite simply, the scenario of Vietnam plays second fiddle to Herzog's interest in mankind's never ending (and futile) attempt at overcoming the impossible -- the fact that Dieter survives as a celebrated war hero is sweet bitter irony in the fact that when he escaped, the Vietnam War had just started to heat up, and would (obviously) go on for years costing countless people their lives.
Additionally, the fact that a German embodies 'what it is to be American' in this film, while the 'real' Americans end up dead or as backstabbers (also probably dead) will most likely also be a commonly overlooked part of this film. Possibly his most accessible feature length narrative, Rescue Dawn is a long way off from his finer achievements (like Stroszek, Kaspar Hauser, Aguirre), but it's a much deeper and darker film than it lets on -- so enjoy it this independence day Americans, but don't forget that it really is just one big ironic birthday cake.
[126 minutes. In English. Rated PG-13.]
posted by EGM at 8:46 PM
5 Comments:
Rescue Dawn (MGM). Iconoclastic German documentarian Werner Herzog's new movie is a big-studio POW escape adventure starring Christian Bale. The picture opened on the Fourth of July in Los Angeles, New York, and … Camp Anaconda, Iraq. What's that about? Critics are quick to note that Herzog made a documentary feature about Rescue Dawn's real-life protagonist back in 1997, and that the emotional terrain of this new film is a snug fit with the director's oeuvre. The New York Observer explains: "[W]hile it is an exceptionally well-made genre film, polished enough to make a killing in both art houses and shopping-mall multiplexes, it honors the classic Herzog theme of idealistic man versus predatory Mother Nature in a battle to achieve impossible goals." And most reviewers think it succeeds on both registers. The Los Angeles Times' Carina Chocano writes, "Aside from a riveting adventure story that Herzog tells in all of its terrifying, stripped-down simplicity, 'Rescue Dawn' is a fascinating study of human particularity." " 'Rescue Dawn' is likely to be a surprise summer hit," predicts Salon. "[T]his marvelously photographed, tautly constructed big-screen spectacle puts you through the emotional wringer and hauls you out the other side." Few critics feel much need to sniff at Herzog's Hollywood turn, but Variety does remark that "suspicions linger that he may have seen [Rescue Dawn] as a last-chance crack at making a bigger-budgeted, mainstream venture that could earn coin and backing for more unusual future projects." (Buy tickets to Rescue Dawn.)—July 5
10:09 AM
Beyond the Multiplex
Pages 1 2 3 4
* Share
o Email
o Digg it
o Del.icio.us
o My Yahoo
* Print
* RSS
* Font: S / S+ / S++
"Rescue Dawn": Little Dieter needs to become an action hero
You can pretty much count on Werner Herzog to confound expectations, and he's certainly done that with "Rescue Dawn," a grueling POW escape drama based on the real story of a U.S. Navy pilot's ordeal during the worst years of the Vietnam War. To at least some of Herzog's admirers, this subject matter may seem willfully perverse: an all-American tale of war heroism, delivered on one of the gloomiest national birthdays in American history, as we sink deeper into a war we'd all like to forget.
Divorcing oneself from the passions of the moment may help: "Rescue Dawn" is in no sense pro-war propaganda, even if right-wing critics and viewers may wish to spin it that way. Herzog clearly depicts the tremendous asymmetry between the American forces' heavy weaponry and the bands of peasant guerrillas they were fighting, an asymmetry that was abruptly reversed for Dieter Dengler (played by Christian Bale as a combination of ferocious intensity and Zen-like calm) when his plane was shot down over the Laotian jungle in 1966.
If anything, "Rescue Dawn" views the Vietnam conflict in ironic and fatalistic terms, although, as always in Herzog's films, the moral questions are difficult to parse. (Dengler was never officially listed as missing in action, because his mission was secret and the United States did not acknowledge its bombing campaign in Laos.) To some extent war was just the inescapable background noise to Dengler's peculiar struggle toward individual transcendence. Although Herzog keeps the biographical back story to a minimum, Bale's Dengler delivers an explanatory monologue to a tiny group of POWs in their remote jungle prison camp. As a small boy, he was a German World War II orphan who watched American pilots strafe his village in the Black Forest and was enthralled. From that point onward, he tells Duane (Steve Zahn) and Gene (Jeremy Davies), "little Dieter needed to fly."
That's an inside joke that only a few viewers will get; Dengler's story was first explored in Herzog's 1997 documentary "Little Dieter Needs to Fly." But no one familiar with Herzog's life and film career will miss the obvious parallels with Dengler, who like so many of the director's fictional or nonfictional protagonists is an obsessive with a powerful life force, both charismatic and bafflingly naive. Dengler was a German immigrant who came to America to pursue a dream of escape and freedom, and who wound up imprisoned in an extraordinary situation for which even his deprived childhood had not prepared him.
If Herzog is implicitly comparing his troubled, peripatetic career in the movie business to being captured and tortured by Laotian guerrillas, well, that's pretty grandiose. But no one has ever accused him of undue modesty, and after 40-odd years of tireless artistic independence, he's earned some degree of self-regard. Of course, none of this behind-the-scenes analysis explains why "Rescue Dawn" is likely to be a surprise summer hit. If that happens, it'll be because this marvelously photographed, tautly constructed big-screen spectacle puts you through the emotional wringer and hauls you out the other side. For somebody who's made hardly any narrative films since the '80s, Herzog remains a master of the form. He may have relaunched his career yet again.
Seemingly unbowed by the beatings and brutality he absorbs after his capture, Dengler immediately informs his fellow prisoners that he plans to escape. A former tool-and-die apprentice in Germany, he makes keys so they can unlock their leg irons at night and plan a getaway. It's perfectly true that the prisoners -- which include the emaciated Duane and Gene, along with a few Vietnamese and Laotian soldiers from pro-American forces -- have no idea where they are. Even if they evade the vicious guards, most directions into the jungle will lead only to death from starvation, disease, drowning, snakebite or simply angry villagers eager to behead American soldiers. Dengler remains almost pathologically upbeat: He's got a plan. They'll kill the guards and strike out together for the Mekong River. Across it will lie Thailand, with its pro-Western government, and relative safety.
"Rescue Dawn" divides roughly in half, between the odd intimacy of a prison-camp movie, in which Dengler struggles to rally the mood of his mates, who are getting sicker and ever more delirious, and the pell-mell adventure of the escape itself. Both halves are enthralling, full of hilarity, edge-of-the-seat tension and sudden explosions of deadly violence. Without giving anything important away, let's just say that Herzog avoids the ideological clichés of the standard action-adventure, in which "our guys" are always tougher and more ingenious than the enemy. Nothing about the escape goes according to plan, and Dengler and Duane wind up trekking alone through the jungle with no food, no fresh water, and half a shoe between them.
There is unquestionably an element of self-conscious patriotism to this film: Dengler survives thanks to his optimism, courage and resourcefulness, classic American qualities if ever there were any. You could view him, with equal validity, as another kind of American as well, a bull-headed individualist who pursues a dream while ignoring its moral consequences, a boy who yearns to fly but never considers how that might affect people on the ground. You can't watch this exciting movie without rooting for little Dieter, but decoding the lessons of his ambiguous story will take a lot longer.
"Rescue Dawn" is now playing in New York and Los Angeles, and opens July 13 in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Toronto and Washington, with more cities to follow.
3:00 PM
"Filmmaking is athletics over aesthetics," Werner Herzog once said, and his astonishing body of work suggests a director with the physical and psychological fortitude of an ironman triathlete. He landed in a brutal Cameroon prison while chasing desert mirages for Fata Morgana (1970), traveled to a volcanic Caribbean island on the brink of explosion in La Soufrière (1977), and persuaded his crew to drag a steamboat over a mountain in the Amazon for Fitzcarraldo (1982). More recently, he pondered the awful fate of self-styled eco-warrior Timothy Treadwell in Grizzly Man (2005). The filmmaker's attraction to extremes—of climate, circumstance, and human endurance—reaches an apex in the documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997), which followed the former U.S. Navy pilot Dieter Dengler back to the Laotian jungle where he made a miraculous escape from a POW camp during the American war with Vietnam.
Herzog now revisits the harrowing Little Dieter story with the feature film Rescue Dawn, shot in northwest Thailand and starring Christian Bale as Dengler, who survived a plane crash, torture, and starvation before he was rescued in 1966. To watch the two films back-to-back is not only to soak up Herzog's epic fascination with the cruelties of man and nature, but also to rediscover how nimbly his films elude easy categorization in their pursuit of what he calls "ecstatic truth." That is to say: There is fiction, there is nonfiction, and then there is Herzog.
Dengler, who died in 2001, is a subject particularly close to the filmmaker's heart. Both men were born in Hitler's Germany and grew up cold, hungry, and fatherless amid what Herzog calls in Little Dieter a "dreamscape of the surreal." Dengler started on his improbable path to Laos during an Allied bombing raid on his family's Black Forest village: One plane swept so close to the ground that the young boy briefly, fatefully, made eye contact with the pilot. "From that moment on," Dengler tells the camera, "little Dieter needed to fly."
Click Here!
This split second of epiphany belongs wholly to Dengler, but Little Dieter is also full of flourishes of Herzog's own devising. In one scene, Dengler repeatedly opens and closes the front door of his home, a simple task that he says took on great significance after his months of captivity. But what appears to be a post-traumatic ritual was actually Herzog's idea, as he later revealed. This was "a scene I created from what [Dengler] had casually mentioned to me, that after his experiences in the jungle he truly appreciated the feeling of being able to open a door whenever he wanted to," he explains to Paul Cronin in the book Herzog on Herzog.
Herzog also staged the opening scene of Little Dieter, when Dengler visits a tattoo parlor and comments on a design of Death driving a team of horses, and later places Dengler before a tank of jellyfish and gives him the line, "This is basically what death looks like to me." "He had to become an actor playing himself," the director says in Herzog on Herzog. "Everything in the film is authentic Dieter, but to intensify him it is all re-orchestrated, scripted, and rehearsed."
British filmmaker John Grierson called documentary "the creative treatment of actuality." This elastic definition is useful when considering the many liberties Herzog takes in Little Dieter and other docs—in Land of Silence and Darkness (1971), he supplied Fini Straubinger, the film's deaf-blind subject, with scripted lines and fictitious childhood memories. These kinds of embellishments, Herzog maintains, push past the factual—what he calls "a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants"—and into a realm where a film can illuminate an entire inner world rather than merely reproduce external realities.
Naysayers might dismiss Herzog's talk of "ecstatic truth" as merely a pretense for distorting the truth. Yet, just as Herzog gives his documentaries fictional elements, he also injects his features with doses of documentary. In Rescue Dawn, Bale, who is no stranger to the outer limits of the Method, visibly wastes away from scene to scene. Performing Dengler's light German accent as a kind of off-kilter Brooklynese ("What da hell is dis, da Middle Ages?"), he chomps on live bugs and performs his own stunts, which run from being dragged on the ground by a water buffalo to a mudslide launch with co-star Steve Zahn. As Herzog told The New Yorker last year, "The audience always feels when it's fake." Evidently, Herzog's definition of fake does not rest on the question, "Did it happen for real?" but rather, "Did it happen for real in front of my camera?"
Given the creative license Herzog uses in his documentaries, one might expect that Rescue Dawn would play faster and looser with the historical record than even a typical Hollywood biopic. Yet this "Incredible True Story" (per the trailer) is more interesting for what it leaves out than for what it changes or exaggerates. In Little Dieter, Dengler speaks in thrilling detail about a vision of his father that appeared to him during his escape; he remembers the bear that followed him when he was near death; he recounts an unforgettably gruesome episode involving the theft of his engagement ring and its eventual recovery (with the robber's finger still attached). None of these sensational events are recreated in Rescue Dawn. The film's middle section transpires within the Pathet Lao camp where Dengler was held hostage, focusing for long stretches on the pain and misery of prisoner life and the resentments festering between the sick, famished inmates (including a skeletal Jeremy Davies). In these scenes, Rescue Dawn has more affinities with the real-time rhythms and textures of cinéma vérité (a concept Herzog detests) than its documentary counterpart.
Compared to Little Dieter, however, Rescue Dawn somewhat understates the suffering of the prisoners, and Herzog omits the worst torments that Dengler endured at the hands of his captors. Clearly, Herzog doesn't wish to make a fetish out of the prisoners' woes or turn Rescue Dawn (which is rated PG-13) into a horror piece. This is refreshing, as it directly opposes the default position of most Hollywood war pictures that put a premium on "realism," measured in just how much physical agony and viscera they can fling onto the screen.
For a man who will risk anything for cinema (and who sometimes expects his colleagues to do the same), Herzog has a surprisingly strong sense of directorial etiquette. "[T]here is a certain indiscretion if you move too close into a face," he says in Herzog on Herzog. "Close-ups give a feeling of intrusion; they are almost a personal violation of the actor, and they also destroy the privacy of the viewer's solitude." An important element of Herzog's ecstatic truth is to allow the audience the solitude to think and dream, to draw their own connections and reach their own private epiphanies.
One of the best scenes in Rescue Dawn is a quiet one, when Bale-as-Dengler remembers that moment when his childhood self locked eyes with the Allied pilot, in much the same words that Dengler-as-Dengler uses in Little Dieter. For some viewers, another movie memory of another aviation-obsessed kid will come to mind: Jim in Empire of the Sun (1987), exulting in the arrival of Allied planes and making stunned eye contact with a pilot. Jim, of course, was played by 13-year-old Christian Bale, starring in a film that was itself a creative treatment of actuality—an adaptation of J.G. Ballard's autobiographical novel about his imprisonment by the Japanese as a boy during World War II. I'm not sure what a cinematic ecstasy of truth looks like, exactly, but it might be found in these echoes and superimpositions of multiple childhoods and memories, both factual and fictionalized. Together, they create something that—like many of Herzog's films—is neither one thing nor the other: both familiar and new, both real and dreamlike.
4:29 PM
These three reviews are from different e-zines. Slate(1&3) Salon(2)
4:31 PM
EGM, you are really a jack ass!! You probably weren't even alive during the Viet Nam War. All you know is what your left wing socialist teachers and friends tell you... oh, and maybe some of that liberal garbage that never quits, about how awful we Americans are!
The story is a true event dip shit!... and Herzog followed the facts very closely. It's arrogant, self absorbed pin heads like you, that are constantly critical of our military and its history. It's people like Dieter Dengler that put their life on the line, so you have the right to shoot your mouth off about something you know little about. We need more true story movies like Rescue Dawn, instead of the fictionalized agenda driven movies about Viet Nam we have seen again and again.
A proud American
11:28 PM
Post a Comment
<< Home