In 1998, Werner Herzog released the documentary "Little Dieter Needs to Fly," about the German-American pilot and Vietnam POW Dieter Dengler, to much fanfare among critics and documentarians. In this time before the DVD craze, which helped make documentaries and foreign films more commercially viable, the general public let the film pass by without a second glance.
No moviegoer should be allowed to make the same mistake, however, with "Rescue Dawn."
Herzog's fictional companion piece to "Little Dieter" and experimental war drama revitalizes a stagnant genre (as exemplified in Clint Eastwood's expertly crafted, but creatively bankrupt, "Letters from Iwo Jima"), which would seem an impossible feat even by itself. But the movie also reaches far outside of genre, to condense internal and external human struggles to their terrible and wonderful essence.
Any Werner Herzog film could well be considered an event in and of itself, as he is closely followed in the "two lives" (as Roger Ebert called it in his review of "Little Dieter") he leads, making bizarrely compelling art house films as well as documentaries on subjects who are mirrored and shaped by his own obsessive character.
"Rescue Dawn", however, brilliantly fuses these two halves into a cohesive whole, which is seen right from the beginning in the documentary-style text and stock footage prelude. There is a parallel set up here between the "preliminary bombing targets" in Vietnam and Iraq. The contradictory specter of cynicism and naivety in the bureaucratic machine behind modern "conflicts" hovers close at certain points in the movie, like the fleeting, false hope offered to the captured soldiers again and again by passing planes. But politics in the film is rightly almost invisible behind the irresistible and mimetic force of Dieter Dengler (Christian Bale, "The Prestige"), the boy who looked a World War II pilot bombing his home in the eye, and said he needed to fly.
The documentary tenor is upheld in the opening scene, with a simple depiction of the daily life of a group of fresh Navy pilots about to be deployed to Laos. Dengler's complex character gives Christian Bale a literal role of a lifetime, as Dieter can only survive under the persona of the natural-born leader, and Bale leaps to the challenge, gradually revealing the enormous cost Dengler takes to become this figure. He asserts his dominance with an easy, sly grin and an infectious need to, with what may or may not be sincere humility, subtly improve his shoes and the people who make them. Director and writer Herzog masterfully strikes a silent bell in the opening, which only later in the chaos echoes as a truth about the inability to recognize one's own ignorance. The soldiers are shown mocking a government video whose campy production values ironically date Herzog's otherwise timeless film. While "Rescue Dawn" is a drama, Herzog makes clear from the outset that he has not lost his wit. What sounds suspiciously like a film-school dropout version of Herzog narrates how the key to survival in the jungle is to wear what look like large pieces of lettuce all over your body. This tension between comedy, violence and truth, which have always been closely linked, threatens to explode at some of the film's most intense moments.
The cinema verité style continues up until Dengler's first flight is struck by Vietcong bullets. In the split second for which Dieter's mask of cool gamesmanship slips, the expert hand of cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger ("Grizzly Man") subtly shifts from loose, languid shots to captures that are all the more terrifying in their refusal to show off special effects and their claustrophobic interior shots of the protagonist's first loss of control. Unable to accept the failure of The Plan, Dengler runs into the jungle, almost forgetting to duck the bullets from across a landscape that is an emerald-in-the-rough to be snatched up from afar, and a thousand black, hungry insects up close.
Herzog is too intelligent and empathetic of a director, however, to fall into the trap — alluded to above — often seen in lesser Vietnam War movies. He avoids grouping the human inhabitants of the jungle with the animals, though they appear mostly one and the same to soldiers, who are the movie's focus.
In just one of many powerful shots, the camera lingers a beat long on a pair of overturned pots Dengler searches fruitlessly for supplies. "Rescue Dawn" is almost exclusively seen through Dengler's worldview, which is so limited that he almost literally trades away his life (by refusing to sign a document condemning "Imperialist America") for a cause he's ambivalent to — simply because America let him fly a plane. But in moments like these, including perhaps the most lasting image of the movie, where two enemies scream silently at each other in different languages at point-blank range, the director reminds us that there is another side to this story. The world that appears to be only either a tool or an enemy to Dengler is, in reality, a community torn apart by war.
And all this is simply a path to the heart of the movie, Dengler's escape with the inmates of a Vietcong camp, where both spontaneous and nightly torture has broken the souls of prisoners captured years ago, before the war "started." "The Great Escape" has nothing on Dengler's obsession with details and utterly engrossing plot to amass, grain by grain, both rice and followers with toothpaste charades, tales of refrigerator dreams and a gleaming nail that he sharpens for days to reflect the mad glint in his eyes. It is impossible not to share Dieter's belief that nothing can go wrong, even as the audience can see his utter faith in people as the perfect tools and the hope he brings them creates the most dangerous kind of madness.
Given "Rescue Dawn" is based both on truth and a previous film, it's no spoiler to say Dengler does, through sheer force of will, eventually escape from the jungle, though not before losing all sense of self. But how he escapes those who do not understand that the jungle cannot be conquered must be seen to be believed, for it is so simple and impossible that it must be true.
The happy ending is made bittersweet, however, by the knowledge found in "Little Dieter": Even an ocean away, the jungle stays with Dieter Dengler to the very end. Dengler plays the part of the loyal GI so well that only Werner Herzog's equally obsessive eye could see that Dieter would forever hoard his food, the terrible reminder of the breakdown of his perfect machine. What allows him to survive Operation Rescue Dawn becomes his undoing, and no one but the audience, brought full circle, questions whether or not a man who believes in nothing but "filling what is empty" could ever trust his friends or himself again.
5 stars out of 5
