Film
Published July 18th, 2007
Jungle Fever
Opens Friday areawide
In Rescue Dawn, German mystic Werner Herzog returns to the jungle setting of his new wave masterworks Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcaraldo. The surreally lush, tropical foliage may look the same, but the accents are completely different this time. Herzog's latest jungle is in Southeast Asia (Vietnam to be precise), and there's nothing remotely ironic about his holy madman of a protagonist. If Aguirre and Fitzcaraldo were only mock-heroic figures, Dieter Dengler is an authentic American â€'well, German-American â€' hero.
Herzog previously told Dengler's strange, inspiring story in his acclaimed 1997 documentary, Little Dieter Needs to Fly. This new film is Herzog's bells-and-whistles Hollywood version of the same "triumph of the human spirit" tale, replete with a marquee name (the chameleonic Christian Bale) to play Dengler. The typical Herzogian strangeness is immediately apparent, however. Everything feels slightly heightened, exaggerated even, especially the All-American gung-ho and bluster in the book-ending Air Force base scenes. And while Lt. Dengler is clearly not meant to be an Aguirre-style kook, he does seem awfully chipper for someone who's just been captured by the Viet Cong.
During his imprisonment, Dengler befriends two American servicemen, Duane (Steve Zahn in a staggeringly good dramatic performance) and "Gene from Eugene" (Jeremy Davies, looking like he just walked off the set of Helter Skelter where he played Charles Manson), who seem almost resigned to their fate. Or maybe it's just from being routinely subjected to barbaric forms of torture at the hands of the V.C. guards. The trio's eventual escape â€' engineered by Dengler, of course, who proves as adept at unpicking handcuffs as Bale's magician was in The Prestige â€' is both remarkably brave and comically absurd. It also gives Herzog a chance to once again pit man versus nature. The will to survive proves stronger than dehydration, leeches, anorexia or any other natural calamity that comes their way.
Except for an over-the-top final scene that would have seemed corny in a 1950s Sam Fuller war flick, Rescue Dawn does remarkably poetic justice to Dengler's amazing true-life story. If it's a box-office hit, does that mean Herzog will suddenly become a bankable Tinseltown commodity after all these years? That's even stranger to contemplate than this "stranger than fiction" whopper of a yarn.
