ANIMAL WARFARE
A gentle rendering of the Holocaust is proof of its actors’ talents
Before we begin, a word to the wise: this movie is by no means a sequel to We Bought a Zoo. Directed by New Zealand’s own Niki Caro ( Whale Rider, North Country) and written by Angela Workman, The Zookeeper’s Wife is set in Warsaw, Poland in 1939. Based on the Diane Ackerman book of the same name, the film tells the true story of a heroic couple who courageously opened their decimated zoo to save hundreds of Jews during the Holocaust.
Animal lovers will delight in what begins as a sunny portrait of a animal kingdom utopia, all floral dresses and elephant-patting. The couple at the centre of it all are Antonina (Jessica Chastain) and Jan (Johan Heldenbergh) Zabinski, who look after the zoo and its inhabitants as well as their young son. Chastain’s Antonina is basically a manic pixie zookeeper, able to sense that a newborn elephant is in trouble at a dinner party, feed monkeys with her mouth, and sleep with lion cubs in her bed.
But the blissful, quite cute portrait of a zoo thriving in bleak times is not to last. As bombs fall in a blitz and polar bear carcasses litter the ground, the backdrop of
war is dragged starkly into the foreground. Everything changes for the family and their lifelong legacy in an instant. With the invasion seeing their prized animals robbed by Nazi scientists, and local Jews — some of whom are their best friends — being penned up in the Warsaw Ghetto, the couple devise a Trojan horse plot, housing as many of the vulnerable as they can in their labyrinthian underground animal enclosures. “A human zoo,” Antonina explains. A magnetic Chastain ( The Martian, Zero Dark Thirty)
carries the heavy film with as much grace and fearlessness as her character has with a furious elephant. At the heart of the story, Antonina’s gentle nature proves itself more and more steely when met with the tests of war. We see layers of her conflict as she tries to keep Nazi zoologist Lutz Heck (a scarily stern Daniel Bruhl) on her side by any means necessary. Without Chastain’s nuanced performance and melodic Polish accent,
The Zookeeper’s Wife would be a much more wooden affair indeed.
Crossing into the ghetto to free as many people as he can, all in plain sight of swarming Nazi officers, Heldenbergh’s nononsense rendering of her husband Jan is a testament to the pragmatic heroics that you hear of in war folklore. Interestingly, the scenes of war and entrapment are largely devoid of blood-shed and violence, but Caro still manages to elicit devastating scenes of war without showing us the full extent of the carnage. There’s not many true World War II stories that can pull off such a gentle M rating.
Considering the fraught setting, the tension in The Zookeeper’s Wife doesn’t always maintain a that vice-like grip that you might expect from a war film. There are some breathless moments of terror when those in hiding come close to being discovered, but the overall tone feels light considering the grave circumstances. Perhaps it’s the ongoing presence of wideeyed critters but at times it feels like the sentimentality extends more to the baby bunnies than the humans being smuggled away from imminent death under rotten vegetables.
In the canon of affecting Holocaust films, there’s no denying that The Zookeeper’s Wife is more of a wide-eyed cub to
Schindler’s List’s roaring lion. But Chastain proves herself time and time again to be one of the most talented breakthrough actresses in recent years, and the moving true story reminds us of the ordinary folk who were capable of extraordinary things.