| RESCUE DAWN (2006) : W.Herzog : 6/10 |
|
|
 NB - THIS REVIEW CONTAINS PLOT "SPOILERS" There's a school of thought that says that films (indeed, all works of art) should be experienced and assessed strictly on their own merits - that we should forget anything we know about the movie, its makers, its circumstances of production, to concentrate purely on the contents of the work itself. In the literary world, it was pioneered by theorist I A Richards as "Practical Criticism." Rescue Dawn provides an illuminating case in point. According to the opening titles it's "inspired by true events in the life of Dieter Dengler." A German-born US Navy-pilot, Dengler was on a clandestine bombing raid over Laos in 1966 when his plane crashed near the Vietnam border. Captured by Viet-Cong agents, Dengler (Christian Bale) was tortured and then held in a rudimentary prison-camp for months before escaping into the inhospitable countryside along with compatriot Duane Martin (Steve Zahn). Audiences coming to picture 'cold' will find it a rather old-fashioned escape-from-captivity affair: a kind of "ordeal-porn", perhaps, in which we watch, from the cosy comfort of our cinema-seats, the ever-chirpy Dengler (who disarmingly greets friend and foe with a grinning "howdy!") experience all manner of dire hardship: first at the hands of his brutal (babbling, bestial, unsubtitled) captors, then via the jungle's nightmarish flora and fauna. If, however, you know anything about writer-director Herzog and star Bale, proceedings take on a different slant. Herzog has long been fascinated by Dengler and his Laos episode: he made a film in 1997 entitled Little Dieter Needs To Fly, which is closer to what would conventionally be called a "documentary" treatment of the material - although it features numerous staged reconstructions, and Herzog doesn't distinguish between "fiction" and "documentary". Indeed, as has been noted elsewhere, nearly every film is to some extent a documentary of its own shoot - and it's evident that, on Rescue Dawn, Bale and several colleagues were very much put through an arduous mill (those are clearly real leeches that are clamped to their bodies, for example.) Herzog has plenty of 'form' in this regard: he's long been the most geographically adventurous of directors, plunging* into all manner of unlikely and harsh terrain to show us how men (and it's always men) discover their true natures in extremis situations. Most famous/notorious was his hazardous expedition into rain-forest Amazonia for Fitzcarraldo (1981), while 1972's Aguirre, the Wrath of God took Herzog and co deep into uncharted Peru. Herzog has always revelled in his reputation as a crazed cinematic adventurer, gleefully embellishing his own mythology at every opportunity. For many years he had an ideal collaborator in Klaus Kinski, star of Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre, who, as detailed in Herzog's tribute My Best Fiend (1999), endured/enjoyed whatever terrible privation and difficulty Herzog could devise. 15 years after Kinski's death, Herzog now finds another kindred spirit in Bale - an actor renowned for wholeheartedly immersing himself in the physicality of his roles: bulking up for American Psycho and Batman Begins, drastically slimming-down for The Machinist. Watching Rescue Dawn, one gets a definite sense of director and actor pushing each other further and further into extremity - while trying to retaining a reasonable degree of fidelity to what facts are known about Dengler's experience (Herzog exerts dramatic, but not to a particularly troubling extent). So while we can appreciate Bale's strenuous efforts to incarnate Dengler's suffering, there's also more than a slight whiff of indulgence - of ostentatious on-camera suffering - which, at certain junctures, even takes on a slight but distracting comic aspect. That said, Bale's absorbing performance is preferable rather better than that of Jeremy Davies, whose uber-mannered, skitty-jittery, incoherently mumbling work here instead recalls Roger Corman's description of Shelley Winters as "method-ing all over the place" on the set of Bloody Mama. Of the three main performances, Zahn's is the most appealing - and, not coincidentally, the most low-key. He's genuinely affecting as the hapless Duane, especially in his brief, final appearance - under circumstances which it wouldn't be fair to specify here. Indeed, Duane's grim fate casts a significant shadow over the supposedly jubilant climax of the picture, as Dengler is welcomed back on board his ship by crowds of exultant Navy men. This is, by any standards, a very odd sort of scene. Earlier Herzog has seemed content to replay numerous cliches of the captivity/rescue genre - including the hackneyed sequence in which Dengler spots a passing US aircraft and ecstatically signals to it, only to slump dejected as it flies blithely on. The 'welcome back Dieter' section is, of course, yet another ancient Hollywood cliche, but Herzog amps it up close to the level of Preston Struges farce - simultaneously undercutting it via his distinctive brand of oddball, deadpan humour. When called upon to express his feelings to the assembled throng, Dengler's speech is a jawdropping, free-associative absurdist/spiritual haiku - "Empty - - - that which is full! - - - Fill - - that which is empty! - - - If it itches, scratch it!" - that's greeted with roaring approval by the servicemen. Herzog then drops in another cliche via a final freeze-frame, its air of bombastic triumphalism instantly undermined by end-titles that inform us that Dengler "survived four more plane crashes." Audiences unfamiliar with Herzog's idiosyncracies may giggle at the rug-pulling tonal waywardness of it all - the rest will be laughing at/with Crazy Werner and his sheer bloody nerve. Neil Young 11.Jan.08 -------------------------------------------------------------------- US (US/Lux) 125m (BBFC timing) director : Werner Herzog (Encounters at the End of the World, Grizzly Man, The Wild Blue Yonder, etc) editor : Joe Bini (-"-) seen 10.Jan.08 Gateshead (Tyneside Cinema : £6.50)
|
| < Prev | Next > |
|---|
