Even the trees seems slightly insane in Werner Herzog's powerful film, writes Donald Clarke.
IF YOU were to glance at a synopsis of, say, The Seventh Seal - a knight encounters personified Death - you might come to the conclusion that Ingmar Bergman had directed a medieval horror film. Harold Pinter's The Caretaker sounds a little like a situation comedy. In different hands, Madame Bovary could have become a cheap melodrama.
What of Rescue Dawn? On paper, this extraordinary film reads like the sort of mainstream adventure yarn that might get Jerry Bruckheimer excited. Based on a true story, it details the efforts of one Dieter Dengler, a German who became a US Navy pilot, to escape a prisoner of war camp in Laos during the early days of the Vietnam War.
It includes copious gunfire, extraordinary cruelty, faintly dubious caricatures of Asian jailers, and stars a genuine (not to say incandescent) movie star in Christian Bale. Break out the nachos and Pepsi. It's Die Hard in the jungle.
Well, not quite. Rescue Dawn is directed by Werner Herzog, one of the few giants of 1970s cinema to resist diminishment, and is, therefore, inevitably going to gather weirdness about itself. Odd things do certainly happen, but the film's greatest peculiarities emerge from the performances.
Klaus Kinski, Werner's great poisonous muse, would have trouble discovering vocal cadences as eccentric as those savoured here by Bale, Steve Zahn and Jeremy Davis. The three men are, it is true, playing inmates in a particularly brutal camp and can, thus, be excused their apparent lunacy.
As the team is forced to eat ever more unsavoury invertebrates and drink increasingly rancid fluids, the film takes on the quality of a fantastically elaborate big-screen version of I'm a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here! But, even before his plane had left the ground, Bale is already whooping, growling and rolling his eyes.
One suspects the director would bring the same unhinged atmosphere to an adaptation of Mansfield Park. Welcome back to Herzogland, where even the trees seem slightly insane. The familiar creative pessimism is all here, as is Werner's feel for the meanness of the jungle and his hostility to bourgeois complacency.
The picture does, however, also work perfectly well as a big, noisy melodrama. We begin with Dengler, unapologetically gung-ho, being instructed to fly into Laos to bomb suspected Viet Cong camps. Only minutes after he has departed the aircraft carrier, he is shot down and dumped in a hut with a smelly huddle of desperate comrades.
Dengler knows that his mission is secret - indeed, illegal - and that the authorities are unlikely to mount any sort of rescue. After suffering torture by the application of insects and the withdrawal of digestible food, he elects to take the whole gang to freedom. Escaping the camp will prove a challenge. Surviving the jungle looks close to impossible.
Released on the 4th of July in the US and concerning an (adopted) American superman inconvenienced during an act of aggression, Rescue Dawn could reasonably be viewed as a celebration of American militarism. But, like Little Dieter Needs to Fly, Herzog's 1997 documentary detailing the same story, this unusual picture presents heroism more as a psychosis than an ordinary virtue. Christian Bale, arguably the best actor of his generation, offers us a grinning, hyperactive whirlwind who, though just the sort of man you'd want on your side if attacked by wolverines, is the last person you'd invite to a dinner party.
Besides which, Herzog has never been particularly interested in the commonplace nuances of contemporary politics. Like Aguirre: Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo, Rescue Dawn strives to address the more ancient, unwinnable war between man and the godless universe. It has important things to say about that conflict, but, happily, it also features desperate woodland chases and plenty of gratuitous violence.
On reflection, it should go quite nicely with nachos and cola.
