But Bale does capture the man’s faint strangeness. He’s unfazed by his outsider European status, becoming an American patriot because his lust for adventure could be best satisfied in the U.S.
Dengler’s real love is for flight, not politics. As he relates his past to a fellow prisoner, when he watched the allies bombing his country as a child, he was moved first and foremost by the glory of the airplanes. Years later, a Laotian general demands that he sign a confession against the U.
S., and Dengler says matter-of-factly: No, no, they gave me my wings. Duane (Steve Zahn) and Dieter Dengler (Christian Bale) languish in their jungle prison.
And so Dengler grins like a nut as his captors drag him toward a bamboo prison carved into a mountain. No Vietnam film can escape the influence of , and ’s epic opening sequence seems a direct nod: bomb after bomb drops gently from the sky, like coins into a fountain, and then the great green Earth explodes and expels itself. And so, when Eugene from Eugene, Oregon (Jeremy Davies), a mossy, delusional American who’s been locked up for over two years, mutters and quivers as he delivers the line: The prison is the jungle, man, it’s easy to recognize a Dennis Hopper moment.
Davies channels Hopper’s wired photographer in , and crosses him with Charles Manson’s gnarly coiffure and a teenage girl’s eating disorder. The end result is a bit much — one senses that all young actors love the guaranteed street cred that comes with surviving a Herzog shoot — but emaciated Davies does exude a truthful rot. is a corporeal film, with much talk of food and feces (though why is it that whenever an actor says, less euphemistically, that he’s soiled himself, there’s never any evidence?
). It’s a film that stinks, in the best way possible. Dengler finds a better ally in fellow prisoner Duane Martin, broken and vague, nicely underplayed by Steve Zahn with a chihuahua shudder.
The escape attempt is hugely tense, and a near disaster; Martin literally throws up as they approach the guards. Once outside, the two escapees become silent brothers united against a landscape so thick and impenetrable that cutting through it with a machete appears as feasible as cutting through the walls of a building with a gerbil. Herzog’s last film, the documentary , was about an American naturalist who thought he could commune with bears, but the bears ate him.
Such is Herzog’s fatalism about the man vs. So it’s not surprising that the story of a man who actually survives the wild would enthrall Herzog so much that he’s told it twice. But Dengler’s tale is also politically flexible; a triumph of the human spirit morality tale that’s timeless and universal, and topical and specific.
With its built-in jingoism, wartime heroics and down-market title, could be taken as a rah-rah flick for the troops. But even though the film is packed with chest-pumping thrills, and it may be a cult director’s first crossover to commercial success, this is also a movie about an unwanted invasion, an occupied people and a soldier’s cruel torture at the hands of his captors. From the fringe to the mainstream, Herzog has achieved a fine balance.
But Bale does capture the man’s faint strangeness.
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