Out of Frame: Rescue Dawn

Herzog challenges convention at every turn. Captured on the ground, Dengler (played by Christian Bale) is asked to sign a statement denouncing his adopted country. He refuses, professing his love for everything America has given him in a moment that's easy to misconstrue as jingoistic flag-waving, and might be just that under the helm of another director. For Herzog, though, it's a chance to further explore his fascination with the American dream in a film that otherwise conspicuously avoids patriotic displays and flag-waving.

The director also subtly gives depth and humanity to Dengler's captors while simultaneously keeping them at arms length by never subtitling their dialog. They are presented as sadistic and cruel through a series of harrowing tortures (shown in uncomfortable detail) before Dengler is finally interred with a group of American and Thai prisoners of war deep in the jungle. But here, rather than continuing with a typical two-dimensional portrayal of the captors, Herzog explores their own captivity by their circumstance, as men who simply want to go home to their villages and stop starving along with their prisoners.

In the camp, madness and bravery battle it out within each man, among the group, and among the captors. Jeremy Davies plays Gene, who has been a prisoner for two and a half years (and starved himself in preparation for the role to the point where viewers will cringe when he removes his shirt), has already succumbed to the insanity of his isolation, playing much the same character he did in Steven Soderbergh's Solaris. Tottering on the brink is Steve Zahn's Duane, who journeys with Dengler through the film's latter scenes after their escape.

Throughout this portion, Zahn and Bale descend so deeply into their characters one worries for the actors' sanity. During the impressive run of films that Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski made together in the 70s and 80s, under Herzog's direction Kinski channeled a lunacy that was fearsome to behold. But his best moments were never in the wild-eyed tirades of his characters. It was when Herzog reigned in Kinski's mania and focused on those wild eyes, which never ceased their talking even when the page was out of lines to speak. It's taken two decades for Herzog to find another actor who he could inspire to bare every nerve so frighteningly, and the surprise in Rescue Dawn is that the actor he's found is Steve Zahn. Bale's performance is the reliably riveting one we've come to expect, but it's Zahn, so often relegated to the goofy sidekick role, who gives the performance of his career, inhabiting a character pushed into a consuming dementia by fatigue and by the jungle which threatens to swallow both men bodily as they struggle to bore a path through it.

Here again Herzog turns convention in its head. He dumps traditional war movie bravado in favor of a subtler touch, as Dengler and Duane form a tender bond through their jungle march. In the darkest of hours, the two men huddle together for comfort against the tightening circle of chaos, hostility and murder closing in around them. What they go through begins to border on the unspeakable, but Herzog softens the blow by shooting their ordeal amidst a jarringly beautiful and poetic canvas of images, complemented perfectly by Klaus Badelt's sensitive score. In the end, any triumph is tempered by what has been lost, in terms of both lives and sanity. Herzog earns the triumphant tone he closes on, which would have been maudlin and clichéd in most other hands, by keeping in mind that those dark common denominators of the universe may not always win out, but they never fail to take a heavy toll.

Rescue Dawn is now playing in D.C. at the AMC Loews Georgetown cinema at 3111 K Street, NW.