Saving Pilot Dengler
In 'Rescue Dawn,' Herzog tells an engrossing story of survival
By Andy Klein
Werner Herzog has made English-language films before - mostly documentaries - but Rescue Dawn is the first that feels a bit like a true "Hollywood movie." No, it is not Transformers or Pirates of the Caribbean (thank God); it is not even an obvious crowd-pleaser like that brilliant icon of prison camp movies The Great Escape. But it is a solid, engrossing war/action film of the old school, built around a star performance by Christian Bale.
Bale plays Dieter Dengler, about whom Herzog had already made the documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997). Dengler, a German, emigrated to the U.S. in the '50s and became a citizen, largely because he was obsessed with being a pilot, and Germany - still demilitarized in the wake of World War II - had no air force. He finally became a Navy pilot.
We meet Bale's Dengler in 1965, shortly before his first combat mission, as part of the U.S.'s secret, illegal bombing of Laos during the Vietnam War. He is shot down in the jungle and eventually captured. Despite torture, he refuses to sign a statement condemning the U.S. As a result, he is thrown into a tiny, remote POW camp with only one barracks of prisoners.
His hutmates include two Americans, the nearly broken Duane (Steve Zahn) and the nearly psychotic "Gene from Eugene" (Jeremy Davies), as well as three Asians, Y.C. (Galen Yuen), Phisit (Abhijati Jusakul), and Procet (Chaiyan Chunsuttiwat). Some of them have been there two years, and it's clear to Dieter that he'd rather die quickly trying to escape than suffer a slow death, spiritual and physical, through debasement and starvation. He manages to energize Duane. Even the reluctant Gene, who clings to delusional hopes of survival, has to join in when the group learns that their guards are planning on killing them and abandoning the camp.
Because Herzog got to know the real Dieter so well while shooting his documentary, he is able to fill Rescue Dawn with specifics omitted from the earlier film. Part of the realism here results from the accrual of believable little details about the men's day-to-day lives in the camp and during their painful trek toward rescue.
Bale's performance is understated and compelling, and, as in The Machinist, he dieted himself to a skeleton for the latter part of the story. (Dude, you do know that such extreme repeated ups and downs are unhealthy, right?) But just as compelling is Zahn's Duane. Zahn is by far best known for playing comic doofuses in films like Out of Sight, but he's just as memorable here in a role that's anything but comic.
In a recent article at Thereeler.com, Lewis Beale accuses the film of being racist: "[S]itting through Rescue Dawn is like watching a war movie made by the Ku Klux Klan." According to Beale, it "portrays nearly all of Dengler's Laotian captors and their North Vietnamese allies as subhuman, barely-civilized sadists who live to inflict torture and physical abuse." He cites the Russian roulette sequence in Deer Hunter (correctly) for its cartoonish dehumanization of the Vietnamese and several scenes in Apocalypse Now! (incorrectly) for similar distasteful portrayals. The latter requires, I think, a near-total misreading of the film as a whole.
Indeed, Beale ignores the existence of the three Asian prisoners - they are plainly not as well drawn as the three Americans (largely because only one of them speaks English, and the movie is from Dieter's point of view), but they're sympathetic. The "evil" characters are prison camp guards, not representative Laotians, and still one of them is a nice guy, and most of the rest are acting under pressure and would sooner not be there. Beale feels that the film overlooks the justifiable anger of the Laotians toward American bomber pilots. Unless I'm reading my own biases and knowledge into the movie, the villagers are plainly reacting in an understandable way to the conflict raging around them.
Published: 07/05/2007
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