At the Movies: Rescue Dawn

Christian Bale (left) and Steve Zahn on the run in Vietnam.

Werner Herzog’s Rescue Dawn is the thinking man’s Vietnam action movie that American filmmakers, blinded by the politics and rhetoric of the era, just couldn’t seem to make. In terms of putting a viewer into the mind and heart of a protagonist, it may be the best—the most exciting and the most involving—escape movie ever filmed.

Clearly Rescue Dawn is a labor of love. In 1997 Herzog directed a documentary, Little Dieter Needs to Fly, about the irresistible and hugely improbable story of Dieter Dingler, a German boy who grew up in the rubble of bombed-out Germany after World War II. Young Dieter didn’t see the American bombers as agents of death and destruction; to him they were the vanguard of the gods, and he grew up wanting to be a pilot. In Herzog’s documentary, Dingler’s recollections of the giant bombers echo the reverence displayed in the face of the young Christian Bale for the American B-29s in Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun (1987), taken from the real-life account by the British author J. G. Ballard, who grew up in China in the ruins of the shattered Japanese Empire. By happy coincidence Bale, whose performance in Empire of the Sun is one of the greatest ever by a child actor, plays the grownup Dieter Dingler in Rescue Dawn.

It isn’t necessary to have seen Little Dieter Needs to Fly in order to understand Rescue Dawn, but the documentary will enhance your enjoyment of the account of Dieter’s Vietnam experience. The real Dingler, who immigrated to the United States as a young man, comes off as an astoundingly upbeat fellow who saw every setback as a challenge; perhaps scrambling to survive as a child will do that to you, if you survive (to paraphrase Nietzsche, what did not kill Dieter made him stronger). “I love America because America gave me wings,” Bale tells his Laotian captors, and like Herzog the filmmaker, Bale’s immigrant often seems more American than if he were native-born. He mocks his guards with Yankee insolence, giving them silly nicknames (“Crazy Horse,” “Jumbo,” “Little Hitler”), and defuses their anger with a Tom Sawyer grin and a greeting of “Howdy!” that Roy Rogers would have admired.

This is no ordinary POW, and he is played by no ordinary actor. Bale, a 33-year-old Welshman with nearly a quarter of a century’s experience in film acting, has given remarkable performances in scandalously little-seen classics, such as the 1992 Disney musical Newsies, as well as big-budget action thrillers like 2005’s Batman Begins (the sequel, The Dark Knight, with Bale again as Batman, will be released next year). Like Herzog (who also wrote the script, his first in English), he seems attracted by Dingler’s foreign background. Just as young Jim in Empire of the Sun liked to imitate cocky, aggressive Americans, his Dieter seems to relish the real-life opportunity to act like the American war-movie heroes played by William Holden and Steve McQueen. The weird, almost hallucinatory cinematography of Peter Zeitlinger, with its seemingly endless shades of green, makes him look like a hip Boy Scout set loose in an evil paradise.

Rescue Dawn is an exhilarating piece of filmmaking, and it can leave you on a high for some time after you’ve seen it. Much of it has stayed with me—the half-crazed, half-mischievous look in Bale’s eyes when he first enters the camp with his hands manacled (you can see the wheels of resistance already turning in his head); the tone of his almost delirious voice crying “Oh God, please let this be real!” as he frantically waves palm fronds to the sky at what he hopes is a rescue helicopter.

If Rescue Dawn ultimately seems a bit of a disappointment, it’s because it lacks the complexity of Herzog’s best German films, Aquirre, Wrath of God (1972), Woyzeck (1979), and Fitzcarraldo (1982). Herzog’s apolitical stance in the film has a great many critics spinning their wheels in frustration, but lack of politics isn’t the problem. (Who wants to go back and debate the politics of Vietnam anyway?) The problem isn’t that the Laotians in Rescue Dawn are presented as evil; their anger at Bale and the other American captives is easy to understand. The problem is that they aren’t granted enough dimension to appear to us as fully human. They don’t really seem to exist except to provide Dieter with the chance to be the hero he’s always wanted to be. That, too, is the problem with just about all the American characters in the film, with the exception of Steve Zahn, as the helicopter pilot with whom Dieter builds an engaging camaraderie.

On the other hand, there is much to be said for a film set during the Vietnam War that is less the story of man’s descent into hell than one of his manner of pulling out of it. Rescue Dawn isn’t about anything so pompous as the triumph of the human spirit, but it does make a convincing argument that it’s always worth chewing through the leather straps.

—Allen Barra is a contributing editor of American Heritage magazine.