The great escape

U.S. fighter pilot Dieter Dengler (Christian Bale) is captured in the Werner Herzog film Rescue Dawn. (MGM Pictures)

Please say a little prayer for Christian Bale’s liver. The shape-shifting actor wasted down to a single rib a few years ago as the lead in The Machinist, then bulked up for Batman Begins. Now, seemingly, he’s back to Nicole Richie portions for the PoW ’Nam movie Rescue Dawn. He also eats a bowl of maggots and mows down on a live snake, illustrating the truism that everyone cheats on a diet. 

But such is the price that Bale is eager to pay to ensure his status as one of the best actors of his generation. What’s notable about Bale’s transformation in Rescue Dawn, unlike his skeletal turn in The Machinist, is that it’s not the only thing notable about the movie. This are-you-kidding-me? true-story drama is a walloping action film, but the director is famously intense German auteur Werner Herzog (Aguirre, The Wrath of God). Thus, any yippie ki-yay machismo is toned down by a Teutonic no-nonsense approach that blunts the glory and amplifies the madness.

Bale plays Dieter Dengler, a gung-ho German-American fighter pilot on a secret mission to bomb Laos in 1966. Of course, there was no official reason for the U.S. to be in Laos that year, but official or not, it sure looks like a war when Dengler is shot down and finds himself in a rice field with his plane burning at his feet. From then on, the film never leaves the pilot’s side; he becomes the camera, trying to spot and outwit the raging soldiers and guerillas who seem to spring forth from the flora at every turn. In a prison surrounded by Pathet Lao guards, the Laotian equivalent of the Viet Cong, Dengler shows that he’s really just a happy-go-lucky science geek, using his background as a tool-and-die maker to fashion knives out of bullet casings.  The guy makes a lot happen with a single nail, but he’s never cool. You have to be a little crazy to want to fly fighter planes for a living, but you don’t have to be Tom Cruise. 

Dengler endures various tortures — being hung upside down with a beehive strapped to his face looks particularly joyless — but he’s an unusual dude. Not exactly an action movie cowboy, he’s the kind of quick-witted survivalist whose heroism is entirely utilitarian. In Little Dieter Needs to Fly, the 1997 Herzog documentary about Dengler, the pilot (who died in 2001) comes off as more of an eccentric than in Rescue Dawn. But Bale does capture the man’s faint strangeness. He’s unfazed by his outsider European status, becoming an American patriot because his lust for adventure could be best satisfied in the U.S. Dengler’s real love is for flight, not politics. As he relates his past to a fellow prisoner, when he watched the allies bombing his country as a child, he was moved first and foremost by the glory of the airplanes. Years later, a Laotian general demands that he sign a confession against the U.S., and Dengler says matter-of-factly: “No, no, they gave me my wings.” 

Duane (Steve Zahn) and Dieter Dengler (Christian Bale) languish in their jungle prison. (MGM pictures)

And so Dengler grins like a nut as his captors drag him toward a bamboo prison carved into a mountain. No Vietnam film can escape the influence of Apocalypse Now, and Rescue Dawn’s epic opening sequence seems a direct nod: bomb after bomb drops gently from the sky, like coins into a fountain, and then the great green Earth explodes and expels itself.  And so, when Eugene from Eugene, Oregon (Jeremy Davies), a mossy, delusional American who’s been locked up for over two years, mutters and quivers as he delivers the line: “The prison is the jungle, man,” it’s easy to recognize a Dennis Hopper moment. Davies channels Hopper’s wired photographer in Apocalypse, and crosses him with Charles Manson’s gnarly coiffure and a teenage girl’s eating disorder. The end result is a bit much — one senses that all young actors love the guaranteed street cred that comes with surviving a Herzog shoot — but emaciated Davies does exude a truthful rot. Rescue Dawn is a corporeal film, with much talk of food and feces (though why is it that whenever an actor says, less euphemistically, that he’s soiled himself, there’s never any evidence?). It’s a film that stinks, in the best way possible. 

Dengler finds a better ally in fellow prisoner Duane Martin, broken and vague, nicely underplayed by Steve Zahn with a chihuahua shudder. The escape attempt is hugely tense, and a near disaster; Martin literally throws up as they approach the guards. Once outside, the two escapees become silent brothers united against a landscape so thick and impenetrable that cutting through it with a machete appears as feasible as cutting through the walls of a building with a gerbil. Herzog’s last film, the documentary Grizzly Man, was about an American naturalist who thought he could commune with bears, but the bears ate him. Such is Herzog’s fatalism about the man vs. nature debate. 

So it’s not surprising that the story of a man who actually survives the wild would enthrall Herzog so much that he’s told it twice. But Dengler’s tale is also politically flexible; a triumph of the human spirit morality tale that’s timeless and universal, and topical and specific. With its built-in jingoism, wartime heroics and down-market title, Rescue Dawn could be taken as a rah-rah flick for the troops. But even though the film is packed with chest-pumping thrills, and it may be a cult director’s first crossover to commercial success, this is also a movie about an unwanted invasion, an occupied people and a soldier’s cruel torture at the hands of his captors. From the fringe to the mainstream, Herzog has achieved a fine balance. Yippie ki-yay. 

Rescue Dawn opens across Canada July 6. 

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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