Rescue Dawn
Directed by Werner Herzog
“I love America because America gave me wings,” Dieter Dengler (Christian Bale) talks back to his Laotian captors in Rescue Dawn. This could also be the attitude of the film’s director/writer, Werner Herzog, because Rescue Dawn’s late-coming Vietnam war story—Herzog’s first American drama—is his best film since his great 1970s period.
Following Herzog’s 1998 doc, Little Dieter Wants to Fly, about the German-born enthusiast who immigrated to the U.S. and joined the Armed Forces to pursue his aviation dream, this version of Dengler’s biography is even better. Herzog’s genius reaches second bloom, dramatizing Dengler’s resolute spirit as American historical myth. It’s similar to Wim Wenders’ revitalized artistry in his recent American-set films: The End of Violence, Land of Plenty and Don’t Come Knocking. These visiting filmmakers offer a healthier and more insightful approach to American experience than the glib, fashionable scorn that infected even the domestic melodrama Away From Her when Julie Christie’s Alzheimer sufferer reacts to Iraq news by tsk-tsking, “Don’t they remember Vietnam?”
Herzog’s latest experiments with permutations of the documentary format (Grizzly Man, The Wild Blue Yonder, The White Diamond) teased the boundaries between non-fiction and philosophical speculation. Despite the varied topics, they conveyed Herzog’s sense of the universe’s chaos, focused on individuals who respond to chaos with what some would call madness. Dengler’s experience in 1966, when his plane is shot down over Laos, landing him in the jungle where he becomes a prisoner of war with several other American G.I.s, allows Herzog to make a fresh variation on his epics Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo.
Rescue Dawn is more pop than those acknowledged masterpieces but not for the usual rock ’n’ roll clichés usually attached to Vietnam stories. Dengler’s attitude toward survival and escape was forged by his challenging childhood in WWII Germany but here resembles youthful American vigor. From the moment Dengler is briefed about the United States’ secret Laos missions on board the carrier USS Ranger in the Gulf of Tonkin, we see his maverick, joking sensibility. When manacled in the POW camp, Dengler’s ingenuity takes flight—and so does Herzog’s. This is his good-humored masterpiece.
Dengler finds desperate camaraderie with helicopter pilot Duane (Steve Zahn) and an American contractor Gene (Jeremy Davies), who have given up hope but hold on to their insolence. Now bearded and long-haired—like war-protesting students back home—they deride their misfortune, giving the POW camp guards names (Walkie Talkie, Little Hitler, Crazy Horse, Jumbo) that mock their attitudes and spoof the circumstances that humiliate them all. (Chained together at night, Gene keeps count of the times he’s soiled by Duane’s incontinence.) Dengler’s perseverance liberates the camp’s gallows humor. He disarms his captors by grinning back and proffering an almost lunatic, all-American “Howdy!”
Christian Bale makes Dieter Dengler an original heroic personality—a strange Yankee with an immigrant’s remoteness from native slang. Yet, the very foreignness that worked against English-born Bale’s American indie characters perfectly conveys Dengler’s adopted American-ness. Herzog has said that the real-life Dengler never recovered his childhood but when Bale’s Dengler gets his comrades to sing “We are hungry” or recalls his first childhood sighting of a bomber plane, Bale’s grin channels the boy Jim that he played 20 years ago in Empire of the Sun. It’s a phenomenal moment: Bale’s bright eyes reclaim the child that was lost in Empire and in the many cynical films he’s made since.
Thankfully, Herzog is not an ironical filmmaker. Rescue Dawn observes Dengler’s perseverance with Aguirre-like awe.
This distinguishes it from other Vietnam movies. Herzog depicts the threat and beauty of the Laotian jungle as a naturally baroque landscape: leafy mountains, jade fields, aqua pools—different shades and textures of green. Peter Zeitlinger’s hyperrealistic photography makes the extravagance of Apocalypse Now seem decadent. And Herzog makes even a long-winded survivor’s story, like Polanski’s The Pianist, seem sappy. Rescue Dawn moves quickly and simply, like a B-movie or a gonzo satire of a military training film. What appears unassuming turns out profound—as when Dengler waves palm fronds at what looks, to his delirious mind, like a rescue helicopter and he cries out, “Oh, God, please be real.” So it’s a gonzo satire of existentialism, too.
