Rescue Dawn
Director: Werner Herzog. Screenplay: Werner Herzog. Cinematography: Peter Zeitlinger. Film editing: Joe Bini. Art direction: Arin “Aoi” Pinijvararak. Music: Klaus Badelt. Producers: Elton Brand, Harry Knapp, Steve Marlton. With: Christian Bale, Steve Zahn, Marshell Bell, François Chau, Jeremy Davies, Craig Gellis, GQ, Zach Grenier, Pat Healy, Toby Huss, Bonnie Z. Hutchinson, Evan Jones, Abhijati “Meuk” Jusakul, Mr. Tony B. King, Mr. Richard Manning, Mr. Garrett D. Melich. USA. 124 min. 2006.
Most of his recent activity has been in documentary and experimental film, but Herzog hasn’t forgotten how to tell a good story in an audience-pleasing way. This may be the most flat-out commercial movie of his career, and in an unexpected irony, it’s a few degrees less compelling than his 1997 documentary “Little Dieter Needs to Fly,” on which he based the screenplay. But as prison-camp-in-the-jungle movies go, it’s mighty effective.
Bale plays Dieter Dengler, a German-American soldier fighting for the USA in Southeast Asia—not because he likes war, but because the US military has allowed him to realize his childhood dream of becoming a pilot. Shot down by enemy fire, he survives a crash landing, gets incarcerated by sadistic soldiers, orchestrates an escape with his fellow prisoners, and struggles toward safety against momentous odds in awesomely hostile terrain. Herzog is an avowed enemy of jungles (see his comments in “Burden of Dreams,” the Les Blank documentary about him, for evidence) and here his antipathy pays off in a long string of emotionally searing sequences.
The narrative comes from the ordeal suffered by the real-life Dengler while serving in the Vietnam war, as recounted in the aforementioned Herzog documentary. This doesn’t mean viewers should take either of the Dengler films literally, since Herzog never hesitates to embellish mere “fact” with ingenious filigrees of his own invention, hoping to discover the “ecstatic truth” he values above the quotidian facts most of us have to live by. Here that allegedly higher truth surfaces during the credit sequence and at a few other points when he fills the screen with images conveying a fever-dream intensity so rich that they border on hallucination.
There’s a lurking danger in Herzog’s eagerness to aestheticize violence, and his “ecstatic truth” may sometimes seem like plain old motion-picture fakery. The aesthetics and ecstasies here are strikingly successful, though, and plain old motion-picture craft—including first-rate performances and razor-sharp pacing—makes this an adventure epic of uncommon power.
– David Sterritt
(For my most recent interview with Herzog, see “The Ecstasy of Truth” in Moviemaker 12:59, summer 2005.)
