Rescue Dawn

Werner Herzog, the extremely obsessive chronicler of obsessive extremists, doubles back on his own back catalog with Rescue Dawn, a fictional elaboration of his documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997), the incredible true story of Dieter Dengler, a German boy who locked eyes with an American flyer strafing his village during World War II and was inspired to do likewise. In 1965, as a hotshot Navy pilot on a bombing mission over the Ho Chi Minh Trail, he was shot down, taken prisoner by Laotian communists, escaped, if that's the word, and, after a harrowing, hallucinatory night sea journey through the jungle vortex, was rescued by American forces. Like its documentary doppelgänger, the dramatization is an astonishing excursion into the limits of human endurance by a filmmaker as fearlessly single-minded as any of the target-fixated heroes in his inner-directed oeuvre.

The only mensch among the New German wunderkinder who invaded the American art house in the mid-Seventies—the other marquee names were Rainer Fassbinder and Wim Wenders—Herzog has proven the most durable and prolific of the lot, his career sustained by the same thick-skinned tenacity and fleet-footed adaptability that compelled him to walk from Munich to Paris to meet film critic Lotte Eisner and that kept him from being frightened off a mountain by something as trivial as an impending volcanic eruption. "Eclectic" is a tag not quite adequate to describe the biodiversity of a resumé that includes the time capsule masterpieces Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972) and The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser (1974), the anemic remake Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), the epic boondoggle Fitzcarraldo (1982), and at least a dozen crystalline documentaries probing the mind and motives of skiers, televangelists, monks, hot-air balloonists, and any other character straddling the tightrope between visionary and nutcase. Among the must-sees: My Best Fiend (1999), a memoir-tribute to the late Klaus Kinski, Herzog's muse, star, and alter-ego, an actor the director calls the one true "demon of the cinema."

Truth to tell, Herzog's documentaries boast a better hit to miss ratio than his always intriguing but often murky dramatic works. (In 24 Hour Party People [2002] Joy Division lead singer Ian Curtis is shown watching Herzog's American road movie Stroszek [1977] before he decides to hang himself rather than go on the band's first U.S. tour.) Years before the endomorphic silhouette of Michael Moore waddled into the documentary frame, the genial German honed a recognizable screen persona as articulate guide, wry narrator, and rational center for his nonfiction meditations, his precise enunciation and German accent, like his gee-whiz enthusiasm for the hunt, never quite fading. Two admiring Les Blank documentaries further showcased Herzog's good-humored if seriously maniacal work ethos: Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980), in which the director paid off a debt to a procrastinating young documentarian named Errol Morris, and Burden of Dreams (1982), a case history of the Fitzcarraldo meltdown, which includes the classic Herzogian existential rant in the jungles of the Amazon. "The birds here don't sing," he sputters. "They just screech in pain."

Recently, a pair of blue-chip profile-raisers have boosted Herzog's stock and, one assumes, helped secure the financing for Rescue Dawn, his first major U.S. market release since the Carter Administration: Zak Penn's mock-doc Incident at Loch Ness (2004), where the director delivered a dry, self-parodic performance as, what else, an obsessive documentarian, and the extraordinary Grizzly Man (2005), a tone poem culled from the video diary of Timothy Treadwell, the environmental activist literally consumed by his obsession. Whatever the generic or geographical landscape, whether Herzog's heroes are skiing or flying, seeking El Dorado or baiting grizzly bears, the Holy Grail at the end of their quest is a chimerical McGuffin. The real magic derives from the mystical gleam in the eye of the athlete, the adventurer, the entrepreneur—and, of course, the auteur.

It's hard to watch Rescue Dawn without filtering Little Dieter as a companion piece playing on a parallel mental track. Tightly focused and perfectly pitched, the documentary introduces the hale and hearty Dengler welcoming us into his spacious home in the chilly, overcast hills above San Francisco, where the proud host shows off his war memorabilia, his many paintings of open doorways, and a kitchen bulging with food: cupboards filled, refrigerator stocked, and, hidden under the floorboards, an emergency cache of rice, flour, wheat, and honey, the hoarding apparently symptoms of an OCD-afflicted survivalist. After hearing Dengler's tale of starvation and torture, the pack-rat impulse seems a sane response to a hunger that will never be sated, like the phantom pain from an amputated limb. "Men are often haunted by things that happened to them in life, especially in war or other periods of great intensity," says Herzog. "Sometimes you see these men walking the streets or driving a car. Their lives seem to be normal—but they are not."

Pressing perilously close to the edge of a psychic precipice, Dengler travels to Thailand with Herzog to retrace his ordeal for the camera. An all-too-convincing cadre of young Thai toughs impersonate Dengler's Pathet Lao captors, barking threats and tying his arms tight behind his back. "This is a little too close for comfort," the method actor suddenly realizes, but Dengler is Herzog's collaborator not victim, a man trying to exorcise his demons by rerunning his run through the jungle with a performance that is less reenactment than flashback. "Just a movie, don't worry about it," he tells a Thai extra, reassuring them both. Without a trace of self pity or the tears that have become mandatory for traumatic recollections under the camera's gaze, Dengler relates his horrific story and (one never knows when this sort of information will come in handy) passes along hard-learned survival tips: how to pick a handcuff lock, how to make fire from bamboo shoots. When Dengler was plucked from the jungle after six months of captivity and flight, he weighed eighty-five pounds. He died in 2002, and the DVD version of the film appends a coda of his burial at Arlington National Cemetery, with full military honors, needless to say.

Dieter's fellow inmate Gene (Jeremy Davies) shows signs of emaciation

Freedom, captivity, redemption—Dengler's after-action report is ready made for the conventional three-act Hollywood rewrite. For once too, the prediegetic assurance ("inspired by true events in the life of Dieter Dengler") is not a misdirection but an understatement.

Rescue Dawn opens with the famous 16mm footage of the napalm bombing of a Vietnamese hamlet, a unique archival treasure and an expression of Herzog's enchantment with the serendipitous beauty of the found moving image. No matter how incessantly replayed, the iconic conflagration makes for an awful but hypnotic spectacle: the canisters tumble like footballs and tongues of flame ignite the green-brown kindling below into incandescent yellow supernovas, engulfing trees, grass, and huts in mushrooming fireballs, wondrous to behold, from an aerial point of view.

Aboard the USS Ranger in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1965, a squadron of cocky Navy flyboys prepare for a secret bombing run into Laos. The top gunners strut with macho élan, crack wise during the preflight briefing, and jeer at a military training film on jungle survival. Dieter (Christian Bale, ditching a German accent) has the right stuff, but the wrong karma: on his first mission, antiaircraft flak clips his wings and, refusing to bail out, he plummets to earth in a spectacular crash that, miraculously, tosses him free and unharmed. He bolts for the tall grass, with a nasty gang of warriors from the jungle 'hood hot on his trail.

Once in the jungle, Herzog is on home turf. Though the riverfront property here is along the Mekong not the Amazon, the splendor and terror of his trademark real estate, a location imprinted from Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo, radiates all the reassuring resonance of the monoliths of Monument Valley in a John Ford film. The lush foliage beneath a canopy that smothers and cushions, the mists rolling over the mountains, the real (not studio) monsoon rainstorms are captured by longtime Herzog cinematographer Peter Zetlinger in their travelog splendor. But the programming for Herzog's Nature—the scorching sun, a dew count that could be cut with a machete, an environment alive with bacteria, fungus, rodents, bird-sized insects, and slithering reptiles—comes from Darwin not the Discovery Channel, red in tooth and claw, serenely oblivious to the human condition. "The jungle is the prison," says one of its captives, and it is also the main character. Somewhere, just out of camera range, Klaus Kinski is raving in the bush, his piercing blue eyes rolling in their sockets.

Quickly captured, Dieter refuses to sign a confession copping to imperialist warmongering against the peace-loving comrades of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. "I love America," he tells his interrogator. "America gave me wings." (In an unsettling and not totally inapt bit of intertextual association, the actor playing the sinister VC interrogator is Francois Chau, the 16mm face of the Dharma Initiative on television's survivalist series Lost). More by way of diversion than persuasion, Dieter suffers a martyr's torments—beaten, trussed spread-eagled on the ground, dragged behind a water buffalo, water tortured in a cistern, and hung upside down with an ant's nest latched to his face.

It gets worse. Descending the concentric circles of communist penology, Dieter is taken to a VC-controlled POW camp in eastern Laos, a hell on earth that makes any previous cinematic depiction—the Japanese POW camp in King Rat (1965) or the bamboo cages in The Deer Hunter (1977)—look like the soundstages for an MGM musical. "What the hell is this, the Middle Ages?," Dieter shrieks. Answer: the Stone Age, with automatic weapons, aviator sunglasses, and T-shirts.

Resourceful, courageous, indomitable, and still healthy, Dieter is the alpha male among the starved, crazed, and rotting zombies who comprise the camp's long-term residents—the catatonic, beaten-down Duane (Steve Zahn), the blithering "Gene from Eugene, Oregon" (Jeremy Davies), and a trio of luckless Thai collaborators, Y.C. (Galen Yuen), Phisit (Abhijati Jusakul), and Procet (Chaiyan Chunsuttiwat). At night, the men are laid side by side, supine, handcuffed, their feet clamped in wood blocks, soaking in their collective shit.

Even with a prescripted biopic, Herzog needs to put flesh and bone onto the skeletal frame of Dengler's terse reminiscences in Little Dieter. In between torture rituals, the men spat like schoolgirls, pout and make up, get sentimental and sardonic. Forming a ragamuffin choir, Dieter's companions surprise him by locking arms and softly croaking, "Happy Birthday to You." When Dieter confides the tale of his winged epiphany as a boy in the Black Forest, Duane can only mutter: "You're a weird bird, Dieter. Guy tries to kill you and you want his job."

As ever in the Vietnam combat zone, the utter absence of the feminine principle encourages the worst in masculine brutality. When a female VC smiles at Dieter ("Howdy," he grins, rakish even in shackles), she seems a creature from another planet. However, the real pangs of desire come from an urge more elemental than sex. Hunched over a pittance of rice or a bowl of worm-infested gruel, the prisoners turn each other on by conjuring food-porn fantasies, fetishistically listing the items on a wet-dream menu—turkey swimming in gravy, pancakes drenched in syrup, hamburgers covered with onions, chocolate milk shakes, and cold six packs.

Dieter and Duane (Steve Zahn) during their arduous escape

A 2006 New Yorker article on the making of Rescue Dawn revealed that the Hollywood professionals on location in Thailand were exasperated by Herzog's determinately bare-bones method of filmmaking, his insistence on doing things the hard way: forty years in harness and the man works like a rank amateur! Yet the visible hardships of the location shoot and the harsh gauntlet run by the actors serve as a kind of extratextual endurance test meant to evoke, if never duplicate, the purgatorial torments of the camp inmates. Bale, whose De Niroesque malleability with body mass is a matter of record (check out The Mechanist [2004]) and whose deep background as the cherubic British choir boy consigned to a Japanese POW camp in Empire of the Sun (1987) can't hurt, gives one of the most totally committed, full-immersion screen performances in film history, getting up close and personal with real leeches, real snakes, real worms, real pain, and enough death-defying stunt work in rushing rivers and hovering helicopters to give the insurance underwriters for the Batman franchise a stroke.

Character actor Steve Zahn, best known as everybody's goofy sidekick, lost forty pounds for the role as the ill-fated Duane, but he still looks chunky compared to his gaunt costars. He matches Bale scene for scene: by the end, his own eyes are feral, deranged. An ultraemaciated Jeremy Davis, channeling early Dennis Hopper and middle-period Harry Dean Stanton, twitches like a junkie and mumbles incoherently: in a real sense, he is no longer among the living. Alas, the Asians, captors and captives alike, are not so finely delineated. The kindest interpretation is that the prism of Dieter's consciousness, rather than a racial star hierarchy, dictates the perspective, especially on the guards, who are given nicknames like Little Hitler, Crazy Horse, and Jumbo, and who snarl out threats that need no subtitles.

Facing a choice between death or insurrection, Dieter hatches a desperate scheme that, though nearly botched by the ever-unreliable Gene, works both as escape and payback. Dieter and Duane flee barefoot into the jungle while the other men run in the opposite direction, never to be heard from again. Following the Mekong River into Thailand, dodging VC, hostile villagers, mosquitoes, and monsoons, Dieter and Duane learn that the second prison system is a cage whose locks cannot be picked by German-American ingenuity. The end-reel deliverance—a rescue helicopter drops a lifeline, and little Dieter is again airborne, neatly reversing the trajectory that began the nightmare—is blind luck.

Once Rescue Dawn breaks through the jungle canopy and awakes in the antiseptic halls of a military hospital in Danang, Herzog seems to lose his bearings. What was lately a death march turns into a pep rally. In an anchors-away curtain closer that John Ford himself might have chuckled and then sniffled over, Dieter's old flyboy comrades sneak him out of the hospital ward, under the noses of two officious CIA suits, and spirit him back to his ship for a hero's welcome with all hands on deck. On the landing pad, an NCO playing MC greets the redeemed captive like a sports announcer cornering a quarterback after the big game. When he asks Dieter to say a few words, one half expects him to yell, "I'm going to Disneyland!"

The undeniably heroic and moving story of Dieter Dengler, the only American POW to escape from communist captivity during the Vietnam War, reaches the screen decades after the pale, pumped-up imitations Hollywood marketed in lieu of the real thing. Certainly the cultural collusion between Hollywood genre and false Vietnam memory syndrome is ripe for exploration, but Herzog, typically, shows scant interest in wading into the big muddy of Vietnam politics or Iraq allegory. "Europe is history, America is geography," said the poet Charles Olsen. For Werner Herzog, however, geography trumps history every time.

Cineaste, Vol. 32 No.4 (Fall 2007).