Kiwi delivers impressive Holocaust drama
The Zookeeper’s Wife (M, 126 mins), Directed by Niki Caro, ★★★★
Between 1939 and 1945, Antonina and Jan Zabinski saved an estimated 300 people from almost certain death in the Warsaw Ghetto.
The Zabinskis ran Warsaw Zoo. After the German invasion, they invented a ruse that would allow Jan to employ workers from the imprisoned Jewish population, who could then be spirited away under the cover of forged papers. The Zabinskis used the empty buildings of the zoo, which had been bombed in the Nazi’s blitzkrieg attack on Warsaw, to hide and shelter their charges. The Zookeeper’s Wife is New Zealandborn director Niki Caro’s adaptation of the Zabinskis’ story. It’s a rousingly good and affective film.
The Zookeeper’s Wife is told from Antonina’s perspective. When poet Diane Ackerman wrote the book this film is based on, she had Antonina’s diaries to draw from. The result was a history of war and the Holocaust that is unusual in that it shows us the horror through the eyes of a wife and mother.
Husband Jan’s side of the story is the more obviously cinematic – he fought with the underground resistance and took on the bulk of the wildly dangerous people smuggling duties – but it was Antonina who had to hold the home together, hide the escapees and earn the trust of the Nazi occupiers to keep everyone safe.
In the lead, Jessica Chastain puts daylight between herself and the pack in the race to be crowned the next Meryl Streep. Chastain pulls off a credible Polish accent and navigates the twists and turns of Antonina’s story with a tough, lucid and utterly believable performance.
Next to her, Johan Heldenbergh (The Broken Circle Breakdown )is stoic, warm and appropriately lugubrious as Jan. Daniel Bruhl (Rush) turns up as the Nazi zoologist Lutz Heck, who in this telling has his eye on more than just Antonina’s talent for elephant midwifery.
And it’s this sideplot, as Heck tries to seduce Antonina while Jan is forced to look helplessly on, that takes The Zookeeper’s Wife into unusual and very welcome territory. Antonina spent her war saving lives at incredible personal risk while literally living behind enemy lines, fighting her covert battles in plain sight while she managed the egos and the fears of the men around her. It’s the heroism and fight-back of abused women everywhere. In The Zookeeper’s Wife, Antonina’s guile and courage is the deciding factor within the confines of what is usually an almost exclusively male genre.
Caro (Whale Rider, North Country) takes this rich material and makes something quite special from it. Apart from the inexplicable farce of The Vinter’s Luck adaptation, Caro has never put a foot wrong, and she is a gift to any screenplay with a strong female lead.
The Zookeeper’s Wife proves that Caro, along with her cinematographer Andrij Parekh (Blue Valentine), can take on a film that has elements of a thriller, a war film and an historical drama about the most shocking events of the last 100 years, and turn in a finished product that doesn’t ever lose sight of the human scale and never descends into the merely harrowing.
The Zookeeper’s Wife is a warmblooded and watchable film about a family in a time of unimaginable terror and incredible bravery. I liked it a great deal. – Graeme Tuckett