Beyond the Multiplex

"Rescue Dawn": Little Dieter needs to become an action hero
You can pretty much count on Werner Herzog to confound expectations, and he's certainly done that with "Rescue Dawn," a grueling POW escape drama based on the real story of a U.S. Navy pilot's ordeal during the worst years of the Vietnam War. To at least some of Herzog's admirers, this subject matter may seem willfully perverse: an all-American tale of war heroism, delivered on one of the gloomiest national birthdays in American history, as we sink deeper into a war we'd all like to forget.

Divorcing oneself from the passions of the moment may help: "Rescue Dawn" is in no sense pro-war propaganda, even if right-wing critics and viewers may wish to spin it that way. Herzog clearly depicts the tremendous asymmetry between the American forces' heavy weaponry and the bands of peasant guerrillas they were fighting, an asymmetry that was abruptly reversed for Dieter Dengler (played by Christian Bale as a combination of ferocious intensity and Zen-like calm) when his plane was shot down over the Laotian jungle in 1966.

If anything, "Rescue Dawn" views the Vietnam conflict in ironic and fatalistic terms, although, as always in Herzog's films, the moral questions are difficult to parse. (Dengler was never officially listed as missing in action, because his mission was secret and the United States did not acknowledge its bombing campaign in Laos.) To some extent war was just the inescapable background noise to Dengler's peculiar struggle toward individual transcendence. Although Herzog keeps the biographical back story to a minimum, Bale's Dengler delivers an explanatory monologue to a tiny group of POWs in their remote jungle prison camp. As a small boy, he was a German World War II orphan who watched American pilots strafe his village in the Black Forest and was enthralled. From that point onward, he tells Duane (Steve Zahn) and Gene (Jeremy Davies), "little Dieter needed to fly."

That's an inside joke that only a few viewers will get; Dengler's story was first explored in Herzog's 1997 documentary "Little Dieter Needs to Fly." But no one familiar with Herzog's life and film career will miss the obvious parallels with Dengler, who like so many of the director's fictional or nonfictional protagonists is an obsessive with a powerful life force, both charismatic and bafflingly naive. Dengler was a German immigrant who came to America to pursue a dream of escape and freedom, and who wound up imprisoned in an extraordinary situation for which even his deprived childhood had not prepared him.

If Herzog is implicitly comparing his troubled, peripatetic career in the movie business to being captured and tortured by Laotian guerrillas, well, that's pretty grandiose. But no one has ever accused him of undue modesty, and after 40-odd years of tireless artistic independence, he's earned some degree of self-regard. Of course, none of this behind-the-scenes analysis explains why "Rescue Dawn" is likely to be a surprise summer hit. If that happens, it'll be because this marvelously photographed, tautly constructed big-screen spectacle puts you through the emotional wringer and hauls you out the other side. For somebody who's made hardly any narrative films since the '80s, Herzog remains a master of the form. He may have relaunched his career yet again.

Seemingly unbowed by the beatings and brutality he absorbs after his capture, Dengler immediately informs his fellow prisoners that he plans to escape. A former tool-and-die apprentice in Germany, he makes keys so they can unlock their leg irons at night and plan a getaway. It's perfectly true that the prisoners -- which include the emaciated Duane and Gene, along with a few Vietnamese and Laotian soldiers from pro-American forces -- have no idea where they are. Even if they evade the vicious guards, most directions into the jungle will lead only to death from starvation, disease, drowning, snakebite or simply angry villagers eager to behead American soldiers. Dengler remains almost pathologically upbeat: He's got a plan. They'll kill the guards and strike out together for the Mekong River. Across it will lie Thailand, with its pro-Western government, and relative safety.

"Rescue Dawn" divides roughly in half, between the odd intimacy of a prison-camp movie, in which Dengler struggles to rally the mood of his mates, who are getting sicker and ever more delirious, and the pell-mell adventure of the escape itself. Both halves are enthralling, full of hilarity, edge-of-the-seat tension and sudden explosions of deadly violence. Without giving anything important away, let's just say that Herzog avoids the ideological clichés of the standard action-adventure, in which "our guys" are always tougher and more ingenious than the enemy. Nothing about the escape goes according to plan, and Dengler and Duane wind up trekking alone through the jungle with no food, no fresh water, and half a shoe between them.

There is unquestionably an element of self-conscious patriotism to this film: Dengler survives thanks to his optimism, courage and resourcefulness, classic American qualities if ever there were any. You could view him, with equal validity, as another kind of American as well, a bull-headed individualist who pursues a dream while ignoring its moral consequences, a boy who yearns to fly but never considers how that might affect people on the ground. You can't watch this exciting movie without rooting for little Dieter, but decoding the lessons of his ambiguous story will take a lot longer.

"Rescue Dawn" is now playing in New York and Los Angeles, and opens July 13 in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Toronto and Washington, with more cities to follow.

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