Women’s depiction of war’s cruelty
In the opening moments of “The Zookeeper’s Wife,” director Niki Caro introduces us to a pocket paradise of every glorious form of creation — animals of every size and description — overseen by a team of benevolent human beings. This is a zoo, but an idyllic zoo. And then the subtitle is flashed onto the screen, “Warsaw, 1939,” and a feeling of dread settles in.
It is a difficult thing to make an audience feel the awfulness and terror of World War II as if it were something new. Though the war was and remains the greatest calamity
ever to befall the planet, it has been the subject of too many movies, good and bad. Yet “The Zookeeper’s Wife” grabs us from its first seconds. Here is life, at its most splendid and miraculous. And here, on the other side, are the enemies of life.
This sense of the situation is emphasized in one of the first scenes, when Jessica Chastain, as the title character, hurries away from a fancy reception and assists in the birth of an elephant. Apparently, there’s some sort of problem. The mother elephant needs help, and the father elephant is hovering and getting aggressive. But the zookeeper’s wife calms the father elephant and helps out the mother. In the process, she wrecks her evening gown and establishes herself as a great woman in the eyes of the audience.
“The Zookeeper’s Wife” is based on the nonfiction book of the same name by Diane Ackerman, which tells the story of Jan and Antonina Zabinski. The Zabinskis owned and ran the Warsaw zoo and, after the German invasion, used it as a transit point and refuge for Jews escaping the Warsaw ghetto. Just watching their story for two hours is a stressful experience. Imagine living with the real-life tension, every minute and for years on end.
This is a film that gives you brand-new reasons to hate the Nazis, as if there could ever be enough. When the invasion comes, an invasion that everyone expects and dreads, it’s a calamity for the animals. Caro conveys the terror of the bombing by filming them from above, starting in panic as explosions are heard on the soundtrack. Soon kangaroos and llamas are running down city streets, in terror. Just to see something like that is to feel sick and want to apologize for the whole human species.
But then, there are people like the Zabinskis to show that human beings are capable of profound goodness. For Chastain, Antonina is an ideal vehicle that crystallizes what she has been bringing to the screen since “Zero Dark Thirty” — portraits of strength and heroism. There was the angry version (“Miss Sloane”), the flawed version (“A Most Violent Year”), the parody version (“The Huntsman: Winter’s War”), and the horror movie version (“Mama”), but the heroism is the same. With Chastain, we believe that she’d do the difficult thing, but we also feel that it costs her everything she has.
For Antonina, Chastain adopts the obligatory Polish accent that movies insist on (even though people don’t speak with accents in their own language), but she also alters her mannerisms, so that she seems Eastern European. Most of her scenes are played opposite Johan Heldenbergh, as her husband, Jan; and Heldenbergh is a remarkable presence. A Flemish actor seemingly incapable of a false moment, Heldenbergh has an essence that suggests a combination of irascibility and decency. Jan does the right thing not because he’s a saint, but because he can’t stop being angry.
Jan is contrasted with Lutz Heck, a German naturalist who is also a Nazi officer. He’s played by Daniel Brühl, who was the German sniper in “Inglourious Basterds,” and as in the Tarantino film, Brühl strikes an unsettling balance. There’s some humanity inside him, but the Nazi within looms large, and it’s impossible to know which side of his nature will dominate.
Director Caro has talked about “The Zookeeper’s Wife” as a woman’s take on World War II. Not just directed by a woman, it stars a woman and was written by a woman (Angela Workman) based on another woman’s book. To ascribe the movie’s virtues to the gender of the filmmakers would be to minimize their individual achievements, but there are touches throughout that are not the usual thing. These range from the sensitive, even empathetic, filming of the animals to tiny moments, such as the sight of a man picking his eyeglasses up off the ground as German soldiers hustle him off.
“The Zookeeper’s Wife” achieves its grandeur not through the depiction of grand movements, but through its attentiveness to the shifts and flickers of the soul. The war was a great external event, but Caro reminds us that it was experienced internally, by the people and the animals who had to try to live through it.