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Welcome to the Jungle: Rescue Dawn

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Trailer for "Rescue Dawn"

If there’s a world filmmaker of any repute less likely to sell out to Hollywood than Werner Herzog, I can’t think who it might be. Most widely known for a series of films with the temperamental actor Klaus Kinski (including Aguirre the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo), the German-born director has long had a reputation for fearlessness and dedication that sometimes seems to border on insanity, all in search of what he likes to call an “ecstatic truth.”

In recent decades Herzog has worked primarily in the documentary mode, with results that are generally fascinating though hard to see. (His 2003 Grizzly Man was the exception that broke through to a wide audience.) Rescue Dawn is only the third fictional feature Herzog has made in the past 25 years, and at first blush its story of an Air Force pilot escaping from a prison camp in the Laotian jungle during the early days of the Viet Nam war may seem awfully…well, populist.

But while certain parts of Rescue Dawn are undoubtedly meant to appeal to a mass market, overall this is not a work-for-hire of the sort that some filmmakers rely on to finance their personal projects. If you saw the film without knowing who made it, you would at the very least guess that it was heavily influenced by Herzog.

It is at heart a story about a man who confronts the soul of nature and is rewarded by a blank, loveless gaze. And it is a film dedicated to the proposition that audiences should as much as possible be able to trust their eyes when they go to the movies, to believe that what they are seeing is real.

It has always been true of Herzog that his “fictional” films are to a large degree documentaries (just as his documentaries are somewhat fictionalized, creating situations to bring out some aspect of his theme). Most famously, Fitzcarraldo is not merely the story of a madman who contrives to pull a huge ship over a mountain as part of an obsession: It is also a film that essentially documents Herzog’s own obsession with recreating that same act for his film.

That line is more blurred than ever with Rescue Dawn, which is a sort of remake of a documentary Herzog made 10 years ago. Little Dieter Needs to Fly was the story of Dieter Dengler, who was born in Germany, emigrated at a young age to the US and joined the Air Force. Herzog and his cameras took Dengler as near as they could get to Laos and entered the thick, nearly impenetrable jungle as Dengler related his tale of being shot down, captured and imprisoned in a Pathet Lao camp so deep in the jungle that escape was considered impossible (though escape he did).

Shot in Thailand, Rescue Dawn avoids scenes of Dengler being tortured to concentrate on the mental derangement caused by confinement in such a primitive location, with shrinking food supplies, guards that spoke no English and little hope of rescue. The lead actors—Christian Bale, Steve Zahn and Jeremy Davies—lived and worked under difficult circumstances that show up in their performances. (Bale lost a lot of weight for the role, though not as much as he dropped a few years back for The Machinist. And at that he’s outdone here by Davies, who is so emaciated that you fear for the actor’s health.)

In all honesty, Rescue Dawn isn’t top-flight Herzog. There were difficulties between Herzog and his producers (there was a fascinating article about the making of the film last spring in the New Yorker—you can read it online at www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/04/24/060424fa_fact_zalewski), and it’s not entirely clear that they didn’t interfere with the final version of the film, particularly the rah-rah ending. You watch the film waiting for the scenes in the jungle after Dengler escapes, knowing that that will be the meat of the movie, but it’s a long time coming and seems to familiar to ground Herzog has tread in other films.

On its own merits, though, Rescue Dawn is an above-average entry in a genre that seldom gets such respect. If you see it, by all means rent the DVD of Little Dieter Needs to Fly, a fascinating look at a life that is only partially seen here.