When acclaimed ultimate-reality film director Werner Herzog first met Dieter Dengler he saw a match made in heaven.
Outside of Herzog’s original prime collaborator, Klaus Kinski, there have been few of his stars that match the requirements of a truly unique personality. Herzog and Dengler shared a common birthplace, Germany, with Dengler growing up in the wilds of the Black Forest and Herzog the mountains of Bavaria. They both shared a knowledge of survival and a primal urge to push their physical and mental endurance to the limits.
Dengler’s story is that he fell in love with flying when he caught the eye of an American pilot bombing and strafing his neighborhood during WWII. The pilot flew within feet of the boy’s house and Dengler was in love with flight from that point on.
After making his first film about Dengler’s love of flying, “Little Dieter Needs to Fly,” Herzog waited some thirty years before making a film of the story of Dengler’s miraculous survival in the jungles of Laos during the Vietnam War. To this day he remains the only person known to have escaped from Pathet Lao captivity and returned alive to his own lines.
But Dengler never wanted to go to war, he went to war because he wanted to fly. In a cannonade of irony he was shot down on his first mission. Unfortunately for him it was a classified mission over Laos, a country whose Viet Cong sympathizers supplied the Cong with supplies and whose soldiers considered Americans to be nothing but imperialist mercenaries to be killed at every opportunity.
America never admitted to flying over Laos and Laos never admitted to having heard of the Geneva Convention. Once an American was captured in Laos, and some 500 were, that American ceased to become a person.
Christian Bale (“Batman Begins,” “American Psycho”) does a great job playing Dengler. The beauty of this work is Bale’s ability to express the childlike enthusiasm of Dengler on his first flight. He had no sense of fear. Even more important he had no sense of the deep seated hatred that the Pathet Lao had for Americans who strafed their villages and napalmed their families. This is the real surprise waiting for Dengler, for whom the entire war was an adventure. As he told his captors, he didn’t mean to hurt anyone, he only joined the service to fly.
Werner Herzog is nothing if not the world’s greatest advocate of physical special effects and old fashioned stunts and one of the last great decriers of digital flim-flam.
Dengler’s crash and his subsequent torture are handled in a well-grounded and extremely realistic manner. When Dengler is thrown into the POW camp to meet Duane (Steve Zahn—“Happy, Texas”) and Gene (Jeremy Davies—“Saving Private Ryan”) the real drama begins as newcomer Dengler, struggles to win the hearts and minds of the rest of the half dozen prisoners to escape the make-shift prison.
But escape to what? The escape from the prison camp is an escape to almost certain death in the jungle. Which is better, a life eating worms or death in the jungle by the slow torture of thirst? This is a tough sale and in the end only works half-way. The feeling of desperation pours out of the screen. There is no chance of success even worth imagining. There are only feelings and a choice of a way to die.
Herzog reunites with past collaborator cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger for some fascinating shots of the jungle, an environment that is the director’s second home. The result is some photography that is actually frightening in its scale.
The limestone cliffs and thick underbrush stifle any hope of passage at every turn. Vines reach out and strangle the escapees as they struggle with thirst, hunger and exhaustion at every step.
Herzog downplays the torture and bloodshed and never dwells on revenge. As a result his story succeeds in telling the story of one of the greatest survival epics ever.
Rescue Dawn
Released USA, July 4, 2007. MPAA: Rated PG-13 for some sequences of intense war violence and torture.
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