Rescue Dawn (Werner Herzog, 2006)
Werner Herzog is notable as one of the few directors to earn a reputation as a genuinely A-grade filmmaker in both fiction and non-fiction formats. His latest feature, Rescue Dawn, sees him underline his strength in both fields by revisiting the subject of his 1997 documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly as a conventional feature. The result is Rescue Dawn, which tells the true story of Dieter Dengler (played here by Christian Bale), a pilot shot down over Laos at the start of the Vietnam war. Dengler was captured and held in a POW camp, only to escape and flee into the jungle.
The film is one of Herzog’s most conventional films, but it is a solid effort nevertheless. Christian Bale revisits the territory of his debut film, Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun, and anchors the film with a typically robust performance. He is supported by convincing portrayals of his fellow prisoners by Steve Zahn and Jeremy Davies: imprisoned earlier than Dieter, they have long since given up hope of escape. Herzog is much more interested in the interaction between the men than he is in the usual mechanics of how to escape, and the focus on the way the prisoners’ imprisonment is psychological as much as physical is one of the film’s main points of difference with more traditional POW movies.
Herzog is also very good at drawing out the power of his jungle locations: this is, after all, the same man who made Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre: The Wrath of God. (I’m glad the film’s backers had the courage to let Herzog film in the jungle again after those difficult productions.) That feel for location, the emphasis on (probably semi-improvised) performances, and a few eccentric and darkly comic touches here and there make it recognisably Herzog’s work. But the film is sufficiently mainstream that it may cause some to have the critical equivalent of jungle hallucinations: when the film ran at the Melbourne International Film Festival, the program described the final scenes as “an ironic comment on the Hollywood happy ending.” I don’t think so – the end of the film is just a normal Hollywood happy ending, sans irony.
Which is fine: Herzog is still making both great films (2005’s Grizzly Man) and not-so-great but really eccentric ones (2006’s Wild Blue Yonder). Rescue Dawn shows that between the more ambitious and offbeat works he can also produce a textbook piece of standard storytelling.