Rescue Dawn

I've just been to see Rescue Dawn, the new Werner Herzog film. I knew the story, of Dieter Dengler, the German-born pilot, who, after emigrating to the US, became a pilot in the US Air Force, was captured by the Vietcong, and escaped through the jungle, the only POW to have done so. Herzog made a documentary about him a few years ago, Little Dieter Needs to Fly, and this was a feature film version.
One of my sons is a huge fan of Herzog, and, although I've always liked his films very much, I was familiar with only a few, such as The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre: the Wrath of God and knew little of much of his other work. So he lent me 2 Herzog box sets, and Herzog on Herzog, a book of interviews with him, and I was able to get to know the man and his work properly.
Where to begin! He really is a remarkable character, and I cannot begin to try and sum him up in just a few words. What does come over, in the book, and in some of the interviews with him on radio and TV, is a geniality, gentleness and openness which is quite disarming. He lives in California now, and his English is excellent. I heard an interview with him on the radio a couple of weeks ago, and it was obvious he could quite easily have talked all day, and I'd have been quite happy to listen to him.
What came over clearly was that, although he didn't say as much, Dengler was a classic Herzogian hero, and that their backgrounds had much in common. Both were born during the war, and grew up without fathers. German children at that time led punishingly hard lives, almost feral in many ways, but with a great deal of physical freedom. Herzog's father was away in the military, Dengler's was dead, and their mothers were busy struggling to survive. Herzog talks at length about it in the book, and I have to assume that he must feel a strong identification with him, not only because of his background, but also because of his free spirited character and his mercurial personality, which must have surely helped him negotiate his journey through the jungle. He seems to have been fascinated and amazed by him, as well as lost in admiration, and in the radio interview he talked about him with great affection, mentioning especially his sorrow at his recent death. So, although he saw the documentary, and helped with it, he wasn't able to see Rescue Dawn.
Christian Bale played Dengler, and my admiration of this actor (he deserves a blog posting to himself) grows every time I see him in anything. I've followed his career since Empire of the Sun, in which he produced an extraordinary performance. Very few child actors make the grade when they reach adulthood, but Bale has. His career choices have been excellent, with very few duds (I remember particularly his coruscating performance in American Psycho), and, although he's made the bigtime with Batman Begins, in which he gave the caped crusader an emotional core missing from the previous incarnations, he still appears in interesting small budget films.
Anyway, back to Rescue Dawn. It was a Hollywood production, so there were compromises, but not too many. The ending is regrettable, seems gratuitously tacked on, with no real connection to the rest of the film, which is great stuff. Herzog recreates Dengler's journey through the jungle in extraordinary detail, which is hallucinatory at times. Bale plays Dengler as an open-hearted, yet driven character, whose determination to survive, like his determination to fly planes, somehow keeps him going, against all the odds.
I must mention Steve Zahn, who played Dengler's co-escapee Duane. A gentle, sad character he falls apart, and eventually dies through sickness and hunger. Zahn gives him a heartbreaking humanity, and we feel that Duane's fate is what most of us would experience - Dengler exceptional and extraordinary, and, one has to say it, incredibly lucky.
So, not one of Herzog's greatest films, but even so, it's still streets ahead of nearly everything else. I'll be returning to Herzog in a later blog - I'm still working my way through his oeuvre, an exciting and illuminating task, and plan to see Little Dieter as soon as I can.