Escapist

It took me a day to realize that just like all the earlier Werner Herzog pictures I've seen, whether the brutal German productions that established his international reputation back in the 1970's or the ensuing documentaries generally about extreme individuals, Rescue Dawn is not a normal movie. It is, of course, something different and, I'll argue, something more.

I was deceived by the trappings -- it's Herzog's first English-language non-documentary feature, it stars Christian "Batman" Bale while featuring other major actors (Steve Zahn, Jeremy Davies) in key supporting roles, and the genre is a guy favorite: escape from a POW camp. Think The Great Escape but without the soundstages, without the fake-y emotional moments, without the cleanliness.

The two biggest differences, and this is where the financial success of the film becomes a betting man's questions, are the production style and the character development.

Based on his excellent 1997 short documentary, Little Dieter Needs to Fly, this narrative version tells the same story, of a German-born U.S. bomber pilot shot down behind enemy lines in Laos during the Vietnam War. (You know, the last war we didn't need to fight, couldn't win, and took many more years than it should have to admit our bamboozlement and get out.) Dieter (Bale) has wanted to fly ever since the Americans bombed his house, nearly killing him and his family, during World War II when he was a child.

Bale plays Dieter exactly this way, as an amiable, apolitical individual who possesses some necessary tools for escape: deathless optimism and an organized mind. While the two main POW camp veterans he's thrown in with when captured, Zahn and Davies (both brilliant and having undergone arresting physical transformations for the roles), evince different degrees of hopelessness, Dieter doesn't give up. He plans an amazing escape, and if anyone is going to trudge barefoot through the endlessly dense jungle as his empty stomach turns in on itself, you know it's gotta be Dieter.

The most impressive thing that sets Herzog apart from other filmmakers is his extreme production style. He's been to the jungle before (Aguirre: The Wrath of God, with Klaus Kinski in the title role of a Portugese conquistador going beyond extreme to crazy is one of the best movies ever made, astonishing) and seems to thrive on a certain kind of chaos. He wants it to be real, to bring back something you can't get through computer graphics or any other falsified staging, more in line with the great adventurist filmmakers of the 1920's like Merian Cooper and Ernest Shoedsack. This is what makes Rescue Dawn highly recommendable, although likely to draw more of a male audience. Quite simply, it sets a new standard for entertainingly brutal realism in the escape film genre.

On the other hand, while the travails of the POWs and all the points of Dieter's journey are totally gripping, from his powerfully shot and staged airplane crash through his various breakthroughs and trials, his character is essentially the same at the end of the picture as when it began, in a manner atypical for a Hollywood feature. There's not even a sense of ruefulness, that masculine-movie closing where the character is "sadder but wiser" which provides a satisfying and customary type of closure, one we expect from every war movie going back to The Big Parade (1925) and before.

I'd like to think this is a choice for Herzog rather than a predilection or, to some, a failing. It's an essentially Brechtian approach to character, one that's justified if the film (or play) has more than escapism on its mind, but instead has a political point to make within the theatrical framework. Instead of getting lost in an actor's performance through seamless identification, we're meant to have a degree of critical distance, forcing a kind of consciousness that (when it works best) makes the work ultimately more meaningful, more powerful, and an indictment.

Going to Rescue Dawn for the thrill of adventure and sweet agony of suspense is fine, but there's that chance of disappointment in how the physical journey is so much more compelling than the character journey, which is not what we are usually served.

But if Herzog's made that sacrifice for Brechtian effect, what is his political point?

The answer is found in how Herzog opens the film. He uses a very long, very gripping aerial tracking shot, real documentary footage (or so it sure seemed) from the Vietnam War, out of the back of an aircraft flying in a straight line over countless fields, rice paddies, farmhouses and little villages, watching remorselessly as American bomber planes drop all kinds of hell and tear the shit out of the landscape. Out of people's homes, livelihoods, lives.

It's like all that Iraq War footage our mainstream news media never shows us. You know, where the shots where we're the bad guys.

At a time when Mister Bush, President Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rove and their enablers have plunged our international reputation into the sewer through careless and bloodthirsty destruction, directly or indirectly snuffing or crushing hundreds of thousands of innocent lives, the first act of Rescue Dawn is clearly the world's view:

Dieter deserves to be shot down and captured.

He's an undeniable cog in America's war machine, and I believe Herzog is condemning him for his apolitical ignorance, just as any Americans tacitly going along with our criminally disastrous Iraq War can appear, in the eyes of the rest of the world, tacitly guilty as sin. You don't care to examine how your actions are demolishing innocent families forever? You deserve a bamboo prison, your ankles locked in stocks while you sleep, eating living slugs from a bowl provided by your captors.

The funny thing is, by the end of the movie Herzog doesn't seem to be passing judgment on his protagonist at all. While little Dieter may not have had his political consciousness raised, he has proven something impressive of the human spirit, in a way that may be more real than dramatically compelling.

I'd call it the mystery of Dieter's character, the conundrum to be unlocked in every post-screening conversation, but in the end it seems more like Herzog just wanting to portray the real (now deceased) Dieter's story and character just as he observed it in his documentary. The story of a guy he ultimately identifies with and really likes.

So what you're left with is the overwhelmingly physical journey. If you're psyched to be taken on that very extraordinary trip itself, do yourself a favor and go buy a ticket before it leaves the theaters.

On TV it'll be a gripping adventure story. It's the big screen that puts you right there with Werner, Christian, Steve and Jeremy.

In the jungle.