SIFF: Rescue Dawn w/ Little Dieter Needs to Fly

Rescue Dawn (2006)
Director: Werner Herzog
Opening in select cities on July 4th (clever)

Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997)
Director: Werner Herzog
Available on DVD

Rescue Dawn, the new film by Werner Herzog played last Saturday night at SIFF. Interested to see more of the German director's work, I rented Little Dieter Needs to Fly, made in 1997 with the same basic story as Rescue Dawn but in documentary form, and watched it just before heading to the latter's Seattle premiere.

Little Dieter has Dieter Dengler retelling the story of his escape from a POW camp in Laos, where he was shot down during the early stages of our police action in Vietnam. This is easily one of the best documentaries I have seen, with a fascinating subject and an incredibly story, edited flawlessly together with file footage and new material, including recreations in the jungles where Dengler was shot down (the content of which sometimes calling into question both Herzog and Dengler’s good judgment).

The doc fits well within Herzog's filmography, contemplating his two standard themes of man battling nature and of men undertaking obsessive quests (here being a quest for survival and freedom). But perhaps the most intriguing theme examines the methods in which we confront the demons of the past. In Little Dieter, we see that Dengler literally surrounds himself with the past and lives with it instead of moving on. His house may as well be a museum to his earlier traumas, with giant models of the Allied planes that flattened his village during WWII, with stores of food (including, most importantly in the context of his story, rice) hidden under the floorboards, with imagery of open doors filling an entire wall of his living room.

Herzog freely admits that with this non-fiction work - and for that matter, all of his non-fiction work - certain parts were made up by himself. Though I find this practice more than a little frustrating in non-fiction filmmaking, I've found myself understanding Herzog's reasoning in that, paradoxically, it enhanced the film by bringing out more of Dengler's character and revealed to us helpful signposts in uncovering the themes of the brilliant piece. This film, as a result, has had the effect of making me reevaluate my own ideas about what does and does not constitute a good documentary.

Rescue Dawn, starring Christian Bale as Dengler, has Herzog playing even more with the facts of Dengler's story, changing small events and even slightly mixing up the timeline. The film is a solid action piece, paced at breakneck speed in essentially the same story structure as Buster Keaton's The General, traveling from his ship, the U.S.S. Ranger to plane crash to POW camp and POW camp to helicopter airlift to U.S.S. Ranger, with white-knuckle chases and clashes, welcome comic relief, and strong supporting performances dotting the path. This narrative sprint unfortunately meant that Herzog needed to excise some of the most riveting and arguably the most important of Dengler's stories from that journey (the latter being the story of the wedding ring), decisions which ultimately weakened this fictional verson.

Herzog's two main themes are well represented here like in its documentary version, and yet, the film never reaches the greatness of Little Dieter. The most significant reason is three-fold: first, the real-life Dengler is very charismatic man who could easily be the friendly next-door neighbor you enjoy chatting with over the fence whereas Bale's plays him not just blandly, but as a (literally) wide-eyed weirdo; second, Herzog's script boils Dengler down to a cipher - we know nearly nothing about him and can't really bring ourselves to care much, which naturally dulls the impact of the entire movie; and third, Rescue Dawn brings absolutely nothing more to Dengler's story than we saw in Little Dieter, it serves only to provide recreated visuals to some of what was covered ten years ago.

Though an entertaining movie, Rescue Dawn could easily be skipped in favor of Little Dieter Needs to Fly, the same story done right, and my favorite Herzog film to date.