Rescue Dawn

The Vietnam War has been captured from just about every angle in American cinema, but the inimitable Werner Herzog has given us a film in Rescue Dawn that takes a decidedly apolitical, humanist perspective atypical both of his work and the broad majority of such films to come out of the Hollywood system. Based on the story of Dieter Dengler, a German-born U.S. fighter pilot who was shot down over Laos in 1966, Rescue Dawn proves a wonderful homage to Dengler and an able companion-piece to Herzog’s documentary, Little Dieter Needs to Fly.

A brave, large-hearted man, Dengler, as portrayed by the versatile chameleon Christian Bale, is a bigger-than-life figure who channeled his inner Mcgyver to help himself and several POWs escape a Laotian internment camp in the summer of 1966. In genre it rests firmly in the POW- escape-film tradition of The Bridge Over the River Kwai or The Great Escape, but this film belongs in its own category as it traces a delicate path between Herzog’s career-long motifs (man vs. nature, the line between madness and genius) and Hollywood conventions, a grammar of set-ups, pay-offs, and leading musical cues that seem foreign to the Germen auteur’s oeuvre.

Much of the press around the film since its bow at last year’s Toronto Film Festival (where it received mixed notices) has focused on the squabbles among Herzog, his regular team, and the Fox producers who financed and oversaw the production. The film, shot in Thailand, was beset with production problems, from hurricanes to a disgruntled crew, many of whom, unaccustomed to working in Herzog’s idiosyncratic style, quit the production midway through.

But Herzog soldiered on. The film features fabulous performances from top-flight American actors Jeremy Davies and Steve Zahn.  Davies is tailor-made as a veteran POW, locked away for two years, who doubts the prospects of escape that Dengler is so gung-ho about. He has that whacked out, I can’t lie, I look like Charles Manson thing that worked to such good effect in Solaris and Helter Skelter, but he kicks the pathos into another gear when they finally escape and we realize the full extent to which he has been broken by internment and starvation. Zahn is an able sidekick to Bale’s Dengler, and what a shame it is that one of the concessions Herzog must have made to his Fox backers was to lessen the visceral effect of his beheading, which is awkwardly edited. Regardless, at the end of the day one leaves Rescue Dawn, an exuberant and satisfying film that truly earns its Hollywood ending, feeling that the New German Cinema’s most enduring figure is at the top of his form.

                                                       Brandon Harris