Rescue Dawn

Easily one of the best releases of the year so far, Werner Herzog’s Rescue Dawn is, nonetheless, crass; like another of 2007’s standouts, Paul Verhoeven’s Black Book, its tale of survival under the direst, most inhumane of circumstances is at once all too vile and, perhaps, offensively overdrawn. A fictional elaboration on Herzog’s 1997 documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly, the film tells of Dieter Dengler (Christian Bale), a German-American navy pilot captured by the Pathet Lao during the Vietnam War who attempts an improbable escape. Dengler is obnoxiously patriotic, refusing, for instance, to sign an anti-American document that might alleviate his torture; his Laotian captors are, for the most part, sadists of the highest order. Such rude facts become integral to the film’s success and, of course, are ultimately challenged; Dengler’s struggle to live is, in Herzog’s rendering, a stubborn impulse (compare the director’s legendary Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo)—as primitive, really, as any moviegoers’ desire to root for him. Thus what seems a plain old action-adventure flick turns in on itself: heroism becomes dumb luck, escape becomes imprisonment, friend becomes foe. Survival, Herzog urges—in the face of the Hollywoodism he’s so overtly simulating—lays outside moral binaries; in Dengler’s words, it’s merely about “emptying what is full” and “filling what is empty.” SEE IT NOW

Rescue Dawn is now playing at the Varsity (55 Bloor St. W.).