Werner Herzog is nothing if not unpredictable, so this fiction-film condensation of his 1997 documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to admirers of his work. Few people actually saw that movie anyway, so an adrenaline-flushed take on the exploits of Dieter Dengler, Herzog’s late-career muse and the films’ hero, seems a valid way of further lionizing the genial German expat and aviator-cum-escape artist. Still, Rescue Dawn’s well-publicized narrative embellishments, emphasis on action over Herzogian meditation and lack of new insights into Dengler’s character make it a bit of a head-scratcher.
Thankfully, it’s a generally compelling one. The film scotches virtually all backstory on Dengler (Christian Bale) and picks up as he prepares to fly his first mission as a U.S. Navy bomber pilot into Laos in 1965. As those who’ve seen the doc know, things go horribly wrong from there: Dengler is shot down and stranded in the jungle, where he’s captured, tortured and finally interned in a remote POW camp. Once inside, he cooks up an escape plan with gentle Air Force pilot Dwayne Martin (Steve Zahn), whose psyche is hanging by a thread, and clashes with a veteran prisoner (the ever-squirrely Jeremy Davies), whose insistence on waiting for release through official channels has kept him and his fellow inmates imprisoned for more than two years. Dengler’s ebullient resourcefulness ultimately holds sway, but he and Martin are separated from the rest of the crew after fleeing the compound (in bare feet, no less). The rest of the film tracks the duo’s grueling trek through the punishingly dense brush, where they’re hounded by the Pathet Lao, fatally hostile villagers and even U.S. helicopter gunships mistaking them for enemy combatants. Starved and delirious, Dengler is finally spotted by a rescue plane and picked up in a riverside clearing.
There’s little here that we haven’t seen in The Great Escape or countless Vietnam War movies, but Herzog juices the genre trappings by hanging them on his customary man-versus-nature/individual-versus-collective framework. As such, the odds-flouting Dengler isn’t that far from the mad schemers of Aguirre, Wrath of God or Fitzcarraldo (although his unflagging affability has as much in common with innocents like Kasper Hauser and Invincible’s Zishe Breitbart, to say nothing of loopy grizzly man Timothy Treadwell). The difference is that Dengler is driven by rank survival rather than cosmic glory, but Rescue Dawn’s triumph may well be that Herzog has grown into a canny enough artist not to put too fine a point on the distinction between such seemingly polar impulses.
Frustratingly, the genesis of little Dieter’s need to fly, so beautifully explored in the documentary, is only hinted at in the film, although viewers who haven’t seen the earlier film may not notice the absence. The ensemble performances go some way toward making up for it, and the chameleon-like Bale’s channeling of Dengler’s weird optimism and spot-on mimicry of his accent may well mark a career high. Zahn and Davies are equally powerful, right down to the self-imposed emaciation required for their roles, and cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger gets commendably down and dirty in the film’s Thailand locations.
This is ultimately Dieter Dengler’s film, however, and Herzog’s fascination with him serves as an unexpectedly stirring rally cry against placid fatalism. Dengler (who died in 2001) survived his wartime ordeal in large part because he was compulsively open to everything, from the habits of his captors to the change of seasons to a risibly gung-ho jungle-survival training film shown prior to his virgin bombing run. As always with Herzog, then, character is destiny; in this case, the destiny just happened to be life and liberty.
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Rescue Dawn
***
Christian Bale, Steve Zahn, Jeremy Davies, Abhijati "Meuk" Jusakul
Directed by Werner Herzog
Raged PG-13
Opens Friday