Sanitized storytelling

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This article was published 01/04/2017 (3442 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Well-intentioned and handsomely produced, this fact-based war film is an important account of human decency, featuring moving performances and some effective scenes. Yet The Zookeeper’s Wife, based on the non-fiction book by naturalist Diane Ackerman, still feels somehow off.

The story is worthy: Antonina and Jan Zabinski were Warsaw zookeepers who managed to save more than 300 Jews during the Nazi occupation of Poland. Some passed through in transit to safe houses. Some stayed on for months, even years.

Jan (Belgian actor Johan Heldenbergh) fought with the Polish resistance, which might seem like the obvious heroic plotline. But scripter Angela Workman and New Zealand director Niki Caro (Whale Rider) are more interested in the role of Antonina (Jessica Chastain of Miss Sloane and The Martian), who fights on a fraught home-front, as men, women and children shelter in her basement and the zoo’s now mostly empty outbuildings and tunnels.

Under almost constant surveillance by the German occupiers and under threat of death if found out, Antonina must hold things together, feeding and protecting a shifting community of people and animals, while placating Lutz Heck (Daniel Brühl of Captain America: Civil War and Rush), a former zoologist colleague and now the Nazi officer overseeing the zoo.

So why this one small story when millions are suffering? Sometimes a narrow lens can offer a new way to view larger atrocities.

Seeing the zoo animals screech with fear as the first wave of German bombs hits the city presages the greater horrors to come. Seeing a camel, wolf, wallaby and cheetah, escaped from their ruined enclosures and wandering through city streets, suggests the surreality of a world turned upside down.

The German occupiers’ ruthless approach to the zoo — they “liquidate” most of the animals, while pillaging valuable breeding specimens and sending them back to Berlin — also gives a clear sense of what is going to happen throughout Europe in the next six years.

At other times, however, there is a tonal disconnect between the relative comfort of the zoo’s villa, warmly detailed, lushly shot and centring around the luminous Chastain, with scenes of the Warsaw ghetto. A sequence that cuts between a covert Passover seder at the zoo and the firebombing of the ghetto feels contrived, while a fictional subplot concerning a traumatized girl comes off as manipulative.

There are scenes that touch on known historical figures, such as Janusz Korczak, the renowned children’s book author and pediatrician who refused many chances to escape the ghetto and chose to accompany the children at his orphanage to Treblinka. And Heck is a real-life character, who used pseudo-science and the patronage of Hermann Goering in an attempt to resurrect the auroch, an extinct species of massive wild cattle that was to repopulate the Nazis’ fantasy of the primordial Teutonic forest.

The story of the Zabinskis is inspiring. But by shining a sometimes overly gauzy light on Antonina’s heroism and (mostly) avoiding graphic depictions of what made her heroism necessary, the filmmakers struggle to build up a sense of threat.

The film too often tiptoes around the destruction of the war, with tidied-up, even sanitized versions of what might have happened. There are details that seem overly whimsical: one of zoo’s hidden guests writes Jewish names and Hebrew words on the walls of their shelter, which would have been a terrible risk.

The uneven material is offset somewhat by a uniformly strong global cast, which includes Belgian, German, Irish, Polish, Czech, Israeli and American actors, with everyone speaking slightly accented English. Chastain, in particular, excels at suggesting emotion just below the surface.

In the end, unfortunately, the treatment feels too handsome for the story’s devastating subject. Not all Holocaust films can be Son of Saul, but The Zookeeper’s Wife is hampered by a tasteful, audience-friendly restraint that feels far too tentative.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca