By MATT ZOLLER SEITZ
The New York Times, 7/4/07

The Navy airman Dieter Dengler (Christian Bale, shown at top left, with Steve Zahn), the hero of Werner Herzog’s Vietnam-era P.O.W. escape film, “Rescue Dawn,” at first seems a conventional action-movie hero: handsome, resourceful, brave and optimistic. But the more time spent with him, the more eccentricities he reveals. He has a geeky laugh. His sunny-side-up speechifying suggests an elementary school gym coach with a Vince Lombardi fixation. He only seems typical.

So does Mr. Herzog’s movie, which reimagines his 1997 documentary, “Little Dieter Needs to Fly,” as a drama of imprisonment, survival and perseverance. Although financed independently, it superficially resembles the likes of “Papillon” and “The Great Escape.” With its straightforward narrative, which observes Dengler being shot down during his first mission over Laos; surviving torture, isolation, confinement and starvation; and hatching a daring breakout, “Rescue Dawn” seems a departure from Mr. Herzog’s “Aguirre, The Wrath of God,” “Fizcarraldo,” “Grizzly Man” and other cautionary tales of visionary madmen.
Dengler is also an advertisement for capitalist democracy: a German immigrant who survived Allied bombing during World War II, settled in the United States and became a baseball-and-apple-pie American. In early shipboard scenes, the film’s cinematographer, Peter Zeitlinger, lights Mr. Bale like Tom Cruise in “Top Gun,” and Mr. Bale’s gung-ho grin seals the comparison.

When Dengler’s captors demand that he sign a confession declaring himself a criminal, Dengler refuses, because to do so would be ungrateful to his adoptive country. He’s as matter-of-fact as a diabetic declining a chocolate bar. Yet these indicators of superheroism exist to be subverted. Dengler endures misery without succumbing to the despair that has crushed his cellmates, but he starts to seem as unhinged as Mr. Herzog’s Aguirre and Fizcarraldo. Under these conditions, hope is a form of insanity.

Dengler is just one oddball among many. His comrades include best friend and mentor, Duane (the great Steve Zahn, whose ravaged face recalls Steve McQueen’s in “Papillon”), and “Gene from Eugene” (Jeremy Davies, in a boldly stylized, sure-to-be-divisive performance), a longhaired, emaciated redneck whose cadences and gestures suggest a deranged skid row preacher.

In the past, Mr. Herzog has been criticized for his tendency to treat residents of the third world as part of the scenery, but in “Rescue Dawn” he has empathy for Dengler’s captors. They are prisoners, too. They’re vicious because they’re bored and depressed, but they occasionally display kindness. When they consider executing the prisoners and abandoning the camp, Mr. Herzog makes it clear that this potential course of action is not evidence of subhuman evil, but a desperate plan hatched by men who don’t have enough food to feed themselves and their inmates and would rather just go home to their families. As Duane explains to Dengler, “The jungle is the prison — don’t you get it?”

The film is not without flaws. The story’s basis in fact doesn’t inoculate it against charges of predictability. Klaus Badelt’s score can be intrusively emphatic. And the triumphant ending — in which Dengler is welcomed back to his carrier with applause and speeches — is disappointingly conventional. For the most part, though, “Rescue Dawn” is a marvel: a satisfying genre picture that challenges the viewer’s expectations.

The film’s most daring aspect is its portrait of the love that blossoms between men in bleak circumstances. While platonic, Dengler and Duane’s relationship has the depth and detail of a great marriage — one in which the spouses understand each other so well that they can have a silent conversation with their eyes. Dengler’s commitment to helping Duane escape — despite choking vines, whizzing bullets, pounding rain and leech-infested waters — is as reflexive as the integrity he displays when he refuses to sign that confession. As Dengler literally and figuratively lets Duane lean on him, the film’s tenderness goes so far beyond male-bonding cliché that it becomes a political statement: a radical reimagining of the phrase “doing what a man’s gotta do” that rejects John Wayne as a masculine ideal and replaces him with Jesus.

RESCUE DAWN
Written and directed by Werner Herzog; director of photography, Peter Zeitlinger; edited by Joe Bini; music by Klaus Badelt; produced by Steve Marlton, Elton Brand and Harry Knapp; released by Metro Goldwyn Mayer. Running time: 120 minutes.

WITH: Christian Bale (Dieter Dengler), Steve Zahn (Duane) and Jeremy Davies (Gene).