CLEANSED OF COMPLEXITY
THE ZOOKEEPER’S WIFE Running time: 2hrs 6min Starring: Jessica Chastain, Johan Heldenbergh, Daniel Bruhl, Timothy Radford, Efrat Dor Director: Niki Caro
UNCOMFORTABLE as it is to admit, there have been so many mediocre Holocaust movies post
Schindler’s List that a certain fatigue has set in.
Exceptions exist, of course. Films like Roman Polanski’s
The Pianist or Lajos Koltai’s Fateless, which, through their clarity of vision and lack of sentimentality, force us to see the horror with fresh eyes. But most screen depictions of this defining 20th-century atrocity rely on predictable emotional, visual and musical cues to coax the audience toward weepy catharsis.
The director is Niki Caro, who made 2002’s Whale Rider and then the rousing but riskaverse dramas North Country and
McFarland, USA. It’s no surprise that The Zookeeper’s Wife, while competently crafted, is on the safe and snoozy side. As with many other portrayals of this ugly period, the movie’s central figures and their experiences have been cleansed of complexity, embalmed in a sort of hagiographic glaze that makes even the pain look pretty. Harrowing things happen, but we know exactly what we’re supposed to feel and when we’re supposed to feel it.
Adapted from Diane Ackerman’s book based on the diary of Antonina Zabinska, who, with her husband, Jan Zabinski, sheltered 300 Polish Jews at the Warsaw Zoo during World War II, The Zookeeper’s Wife opens on an idyllic note. It’s the summer of 1939 and Antonina (Chastain), who runs the zoo alongside Jan (Johan Heldenbergh), is doing the morning rounds (“Good morning, sveethart,” she coos to a tiger).
Then all hell breaks loose. Germany invades Poland and bombs land on the zoo, sending animals scurrying into the city. Shots of a camel trotting down a debris-strewn street and a tiger sniffing a pile of rubble as dazed civilians look on are among the film’s most striking images – though the sight of Nazis gunning down an elephant is sure to make even non-animal-lovers flinch.
Enter chief Nazi zoologist Lutz Heck (Daniel Bruhl), who offers to transport the zoo’s surviving “prize animals” to Germany until the war is over (he wants to use them for “selective breeding” to create genetically superior animals). But rather than allow the zoo to be shut down in the meantime, Antonina and Jan convince Heck to let them run it as a pig farm to provide meat for German soldiers. The pigs are to be fed with garbage that Jan will collect from the Warsaw Ghetto. What the zookeepers don’t tell Heck, of course, is that Jan will also sneak Jews on to his truck, hiding them under the litter.
And so a sort of underground railroad is born, with Antonina rushing new arrivals into the basement of the house she shares with Jan and their young son, Ryszard (played first by Timothy Radford, then Val Maloku). “A human zoo,” Antonina sighs, a notion that’s visualised with typical literal-mindedness in a scene that finds her tending to a Jewish teen (Shira Haas) cowering amid hay piles in one of the cages.
“I was raised with these people,” Jan later tells Antonina. “Jews, Gentiles, it never mattered to me.” The line exemplifies the film’s tendency to telegraph its main characters’ goodness.
Caro and screenwriter Angela Workman display little interest in the often messy interactions between history and humanity. No wonder The Zookeeper’s
Wife feels most alive when it casts shadows over Antonina’s saintly glow. Knowing that Heck has fallen for her, Antonina flirts with him, using her wiles to earn his trust – and making Jan jealous. It’s the movie’s soapiest touch, but at least it brings the central couple down to earth a bit, giving them a welcome frisson of good old-fashioned dysfunction. In one scene that stands out, Antonina pulls Heck into an embrace, covering his ears so he won’t hear the noises being made by the children in the basement.
The film is smoothly made, with assured contributions from DP Andrij Parekh and production designer Suzie Davies. Most impressive of all are the zebras, monkeys, wolves and lion cubs.
It’s hard for the human performers to compete, though Chastain is, as usual, fine, ably conveying the steel behind Antonina’s fragile façade. Heldenbergh has little to do, but his expressive, Modigliani-esque face does a lot of it for him. And Bruhl adds a few intriguing notes of desire and mercy to what otherwise might have been a cartoon villain. On the other hand, the fact that the Jewish characters are all so sketchily drawn that they barely register is perhaps the most unfortunate of the movie’s shortcomings. – Hollywood Reporter