READ MORE: Critic's Choice: Best of 2007

GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW (posted 7/5/07)

In recent years, German director Werner Herzog's reputation as a creator of almost impossibly intense fiction films has been eclipsed by his unique work as a documentarian. Of course, many of the fiction films that helped make said reputation were, in a sense, documentaries in which only the players were acting out fictional scenarios. That raft careening down the Amazon at the end of Aguirre: The Wrath of God was likely as precarious a craft as the one the "real" Aguirre so proudly and madly stood at the prow of. The steamship going up the mountain to fulfill Fitzcarraldo's dream of building an opera house on a Peruvian peak (in the film entitled Fitzcarraldo) was as good as genuine. And so on. After 1987's Cobra Verde, Herzog's final collaboration with the iconically eccentric actor Klaus Kinski, who personified both Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo in Herzog's prior films, Herzog seemed to abandon fiction filmmaking — which, truth to tell, had always gone hand-in-hand with his documentary production — and went on to create some of the most striking albeit subjective and sometimes hallucinatory docs the world has ever seen. From his sci-fi reimagining of the fire lakes of the burning Kuwait oil fields in 1992's Lessons of Darkness, to the crazed ramblings of doomed bear lover Timothy Treadwell in 2005's Grizzly Man, Herzog's images and sounds (the sounds frequently being of his own dry voice, philosophizing) have been among the most indelible contemporary cinema has to offer.

In 2001 Herzog essayed a return to fiction filmmaking with the intriguing but hobbled Nazism parable Invincible. His latest fiction film, Rescue Dawn, is getting a big push from distributor MGM in the triumph-of-the-human-spirit vein, and indeed it could be said to satisfy on that count, big time. But there's more to it than that. Rescue Dawn is based on the real-life exploits of one Dieter Dengler, a German-born American citizen whose story was told by Herzog before, in his stunning 1997 doc Little Dieter Needs to Fly.

Rescue Dawn tells a chronologically small but obviously profound part of Dengler's amazing story. It begins with the gung-ho Dengler, now fully identifying himself as an American, assigned to a bombing mission over Laos in 1965 — not just back when the Vietnam "conflict" seemed "winnable," but also back when U.S. public awareness of the whole mess was somewhat lower than it would become. Dengler, played with always-improbable wide-eyed optimism by Bale, is all for the cause and the mission, and no sooner does he get off the ground than he gets shot down. He escapes from the wreckage of his plane only to get captured and thrown into a thoroughly makeshift but equally brutal and seemingly inescapable prison camp. The other inmates, played by Zahn and Davies, appear well and truly drained of both spirit and sanity by their Laotian captors, who are understandably ticked off at the vindictive, not to mention one-hundred-percent illegal, bombing of their land. (That Rescue Dawn doesn't provide more historical "context" and largely depicts the Laotian prison custodians as fairly nasty has inspired at least one critic to characterize the film as "racist," which it's not; this is a film that, like all of Herzog's, has a particular perspective, and any attempt to "historicize" the story or provide the Laotian "perspective" on it would have stopped it as dead as any putatively "serious" discussion of the abortion option would have done to Knocked Up. Herzog's here to tell this story, not to do your homework for you.)

One actually worries about the real-life Davies during the prison camp scenes — he's that thin. In any case, Bale's Dengler remains crazily chipper as he concocts an escape scheme (in which they are, as it happens, kind of aided by a Laotian guard who deigns to provide them with more rice than the prisoners have been rationed), and only really starts to lose it once he's out, when there's nothing but water and weird jungle greenery and snakes all around. As with so many of Herzog's films, the theme of man versus nature takes center stage, and anyone who might think that Herzog, at 63 (his age during the film's making), would be shyer than he used to be about getting into the thick of these things has got another thing coming. The jungle struggles are as vivid and icky and engrossing as anything Aguirre had to offer.

This is filmmaking that's as rousing as it is strange, and the film's final image, of the sheets of a hospital gurney blowing in the wake of an ascending helicopter, is both exhilarating and ghostly. Except that's not the film's final image; Rescue Dawn ends instead with a rah-rah coda (which I suspect might have been imposed by one of the motley crew of financiers Herzog enlisted to get the film made) that's both gratuitous and reductive. But not fatally reductive. Resuce Dawn is, in fact, one of the year's most remarkable pictures.

— Glenn Kenny