Rescue Dawn.

"After making the 1997 documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly - which recounted the life of German-American pilot Dieter Dengler shot down in 1966 on a secret bombing raid over Laos and held by the Viet Cong under near-Deer Hunter conditions - Werner Herzog decided to try it again with actors, among them Christian Bale," writes David Edelstein in New York. "The film, Rescue Dawn, is so good it makes you wish that Herzog had gone Hollywood earlier in his career."

"The issue, I suspect, is one not of Herzog selling out but of Hollywood wanting to buy in, and Bale duly serves up a chipper portrait of courage under pressure, remaining fresh-faced even as his cheeks wither to a monkish gauntness," writes Anthony Lane in the New Yorker. "Yet his dramatized sufferings, however intense, pale beside the real ones recounted by Dengler - a middle-aged survivor, his courtesy and boyishness undimmed—in Little Dieter Needs to Fly.... Werner Herzog is the last great hallucinator in cinema, so why break the spell?"

Updated through 7/8.

"Just as Grizzly Man was regularly and erroneously read as a Very Special Animal Planet segment, so may Rescue Dawn be boxed-in as a proficient, survival action flick," writes Fernando F Croce at Slant. "On the surface a disconcertingly mainstream project for the existential German maverick, the film gradually stretches its generic skin to reveal flashes of Herzog's visionary eccentricity, which, while for the most part subdued as to not disrupt the overall inspirational mood, continually throw the material into a myriad of fascinating angles."

Brandon Harris: "In genre it rests firmly in the POW escape film tradition of The Bridge Over the River Kwai or The Great Escape, but this slice of 'Nam kammerspiel belongs on its own plane, as it traces at delicate path between Herzog's career long motifs (Man vs Nature, the line between madness and genius, random grotesquery, how our ideologies collapse under the weight of stress and mania) with Hollywood conventions, a grammar of set-ups, pay-offs and leading musical cues which seem foreign to the German auteur's oeuvre."

"The fine cast includes a haunted, haggard Steve Zahn and the jittery, dangerously emaciated Jeremy Davies as fellow prisoners driven half mad by their ordeal," notes Newsweek's David Ansen. "This being a Herzog movie (and a thumping good one), you can't be sure if they are acting or if their director's zeal for authenticity has indeed driven them round the bend."

Mekado Murphy talks with Herzog for the New York Times; and there's an accompanying audio slide show Herzog narrates as well, in which he explains why he's happy that circumstances have conspired to see this film open on July 4.

Updates, 7/3: "Is there anything going on in the world today on a political level that you think may resonate with Dieter's story?" asks Anthony Kaufman asks Herzog for IFC News. The answer:

We should be cautious, because there are an abundance of films that are anti-American or at least question American's attitude in the world. Strangely enough, this is a film that praises the real qualities of America. In Dieter Dengler, you had the best you can find in America: courage, frontier spirit, loyalty, the joy of life. He's the quintessential immigrant. He wanted to fly and America gave him wings. As you may know, I live in America, and it's not for no reason. I like America, even though I see there's trouble at the moment and turmoil. But in my opinion, America always has a kind of resilience and youthfulness to overcome all these things. Everyone is desperate about the situation right now and I keep saying, "Look back 50 years ago, how America overcame the McCarthy witchhunts." There is something I like about America, it's dear to my heart and I'm a guest in your country. It's not that I don't have some ambivalent feelings, but strangely enough, the film is against the trend.

Also: "In a strange way, the added information Dengler provided Herzog before his death might make the fictional Rescue Dawn more truthful than the non-fiction Little Dieter Needs to Fly, a very Herzogian notion indeed," writes Matt Singer.

Online viewing tip. Zahn's on ReelerTV, where ST VanAirsdale discusses the film, too, with Vadim Rizov.

"Many movies falsely promise what Rescue Dawn delivers: a thrilling, visceral adventure about what marketers and book flap writers like to call 'the resilience of the human spirit,'" writes Jürgen Fauth. "To Herzog’s credit, this most American of his films hits all the marks of the genre splendidly without ever resorting to easy shock tactics or vilification of the so-called enemy. Rescue Dawn is that rarest of beasts, a powerful fiction based on fact that sacrifices neither storytelling nor the truth."

Nick Schager talks with Herzog for SOMA Magazine.

Update, 7/4: "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," writes Matt Zoller Seitz in the NYT. "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.... The film's most daring aspect is its portrait of the love that blossoms between men in bleak circumstances.... [T]he 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."

"[I]n its stirring depiction of an American serviceman whose certainty and resolve renew hope within his downcast fellow fighters, Rescue Dawn offers a fitting story of tenacious courage appropriate for release on America's birthday," writes Christian Hamaker at Crosswalk.

In the L Magazine, Nicolas Rapold finds it "necessarily less riveting" than Little Dieter.

Aaron Hillis talks with Herzog for the Voice.

Scott Macaulay posts an excerpt from James Ponsoldt's interview with Herzog for the upcoming issue of Filmmaker.

"Although suffused with Herzog's own particular brand of jungle madness, Rescue Dawn - which was shot mainly in Thailand - has as much in common with James Fenimore Cooper novels and Viet-era Indian westerns (A Man Called Horse, Jeremiah Johnson) as it does with The Deer Hunter," writes J Hoberman in the Voice. "The lone conquistador has joined the club. Rescue Dawn is a Rambo movie without the Man (who, if I remember my Rambology, was himself of German descent). Here, Herzog demonstrates his own American-ness by applying Stallone's triumphalist logic."

Updates, 7/5: As part of this week's LA Weekly cover package, Joe Donnelly profiles Christian Bale:

So what attracted Herzog to the young actor in the first place?

"What drew me to Christian is that he is the best of his generation," he says.

Oh, yeah. There's that.

Also: "Ten Christian Bale movies not to be missed."

And then, of course, there's Scott Foundas's review. Rescue Dawn is "an intensely physical, distinctly Herzog-ian chronicle of one man's battle against nature, hostile combatants and, finally, himself.... Dengler plots and executes an escape that rivals, in its sure-footed methodicalness, that of the jailed French Resistance lieutenant in the greatest of all prison-break movies: Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped." At the same time, "it's probably the most unapologetically patriotic American movie since Yankee Doodle Dandy.... But this resolutely apolitical movie sees love for king and love for country as two separate and distinct things.... [I]n a time of überfashionable USA bashing, Herzog has the temerity to suggest that homilies like 'land of the free' and 'home of the brave' haven't entirely lost their meaning."

This is Herzog's "best film since his great 1970s period," argues Armond White in the New York Press.

"Divorcing oneself from the passions of the moment may help," advises Andrew O'Hehir in Salon. "Rescue Dawn is in no sense pro-war propaganda, even if right-wing critics and viewers may wish to spin it that way." And at least a few on the left, too, it'd seem. "If anything, Rescue Dawn views the Vietnam conflict in ironic and fatalistic terms, although, as always in Herzog's films, the moral questions are difficult to parse."

"It's odd, isn't it?" ponders Richard Schickel in Time. "A fictional movie that is in some sense more literal and less haunting than the documentary version of the same story. Werner Herzog is a great and demanding filmmaker - sort of a Joseph Conrad for our time - and there is nothing notably wrong with Rescue Dawn. If you have the stomach for it, it will hold your attention. But it is still Little Dieter, toying with the unspoken enigmas of heroism, which elevates this tale to the level of art."

Updates, 7/7: Nathan Rabin interviews Zahn for the AV Club, where Scott Tobias gives the film a B+.

"You wonder, watching Rescue Dawn, if Herzog might have had a future making American action films," writes Bilge Ebiri at Nerve. "But alas, the film we're left with is too well-made to ignore, but too small-minded to rank with Herzog's better work."

The LA CityBeat's Andy Klein isn't buying Lewis Beale's accusation of racism.

"One can only imagine a Rescue Dawn with Chuck Norris in the lead; as it is, it suggests a granola version of an 80s Vietnam War film," writes Steve Erickson for Gay City News. "Mostly by omitting any discussion of the war's merits, it may lean to the right."

"Herzog and Bale aren't being creative together in Rescue Dawn: they're sharing pathologies," proposes Dan Callahan at Bright Lights After Dark. "Just because Herzog loves to endure filming in remote locations, and just because Bale likes to punish his body for his art doesn't make their masochistic predilections interesting, at least not here; they bring out the worst in each other. This is not a good movie, but it is fairly telling. Underneath Rescue Dawn's rather sunny, seemingly neutral point of view, bug-eating and knee-jerk militarism stand in for the uncomfortable position of America, culturally, politically and morally."

Updates, 7/8: "Actually, Rescue Dawn feels to me like the worst of both words: conventional but not fun," writes Phil Nugent. "Herzog is still a one-thing-at-a-time kind of director, and when he's working on this material and wants to steer clear of politics and mysticism and hallucinatory views of nature, that mostly means actors shuffling around a muddy set suffering their asses off."

"In an age when US soldiers are seen as villains or victims, the movie offers a GI who bravely, or madly, simply refuses to die," writes Richard Corliss for Time. "Herzog is another of those extraordinary creatures. He wants to fly blind and see clearly. That way a man can make art as strange or twisted or ennobling as the lives of the people he puts into his remarkable movies."

Posted by dwhudson at July 2, 2007 8:29 AM