Having already been put on display for man's enjoyment, they must now die at the hands of man's wars. When the zoo becomes the target of a sustained bombing campaign, Caro cuts between several heartbreaking shots of the animals in their cages, panicking at this strange threat but unable to flee it: cheetahs pawing uselessly, monkeys screeching to no one. The early scenes in 1939, as the war breaches Poland, are the most compelling. Jan pouts jealously in the background whenever Heck pays Antonina any attention, as though she chose to entertain the affections of her zoo's Nazi occupier. But the film's characterization of him is lazy, making him a kind face for the first act before flipping him to abject, predatory evil. Though a professed lover of animals, he didn't hesitate to kill the four-legged denizens of the Warsaw Zoo he also launched a Jurassic Park-style breeding program attempting to resurrect extinct species of cattle and horse, including the mythical auroch. Heck was, in real life, a man of untenable contradictions. Instead, to fill time and add artificial layers of steely determination, we see Antonina try to outmaneuver some horndoggery from villain Lutz Heck, head of the Berlin Zoo and Hitler's chief zoologist (played by poor Daniel Brühl, Hollywood's go-to Nazi and/or Nazi descendant).
Historical context the zookeepers wife code#
We also miss a lot of the fascinating details of her character that informed the book: for example, that she gave animal code names to her refugees, further drawing home the unsettling parallel that makes the story so distinctive.
Historical context the zookeepers wife movie#
But the movie never shows Antonina writing in her diary, so we miss the context of why it's her story. And Chastain (who, like Heldenbergh, can fake a good Polish accent to distract us from the fact she's still speaking English) makes her into a magnetic, principled force who can hold her own even when sharing the screen with a live rabbit. To be sure, Antonina worked in tandem with Jan and was as essential to the Jew-smuggling operation as she was to the animal upkeep - the title is meant to be ironic. (Chastain is also an executive producer.) But author Diane Ackerman, who wrote the nonfiction book the film is based on, drew from Jan's wife Antonina's diaries for research this explains why Antonina's title is front and center, and why the film insists Jessica Chastain's pure-hearted portrayal of her is the only lead role. Once Jan convinces the Germans to let him turn the empty zoo into a pig farm, he's also the one who must venture in and out of the ghetto to smuggle people out in a truck filled with pig feed - Jews saved by treyf. As we see, patriarch Jan Zabinski (Flemish actor Johan Heldenbergh, from The Broken Circle Breakdown) is the family member who first decides to house Jews on their grounds. When it comes to spotlighting its heroes, though, there's another balance sheet the film can't square. Zookeepers protect animals because they are alive and unique and deserving of our love why not do the same for people, just because? Director Niki Caro and screenwriter Angela Workman have created, perhaps unintentionally, a sensible balance sheet for all living things. So it makes perfect sense not to encounter the Jews they saved all that closely as true characters, even though the omission feels crude from a distance. We are seeing this story play out from the perspective of the Zabinskis, who are naturally compassionate people but prior to the war had only needed to exercise that compassion on their zoo collection. Now they had to huddle amidst the hay and feeding products, and train themselves not to fidget or make a sound until they heard Antonina Zabinski play a certain melody on the piano. The Zabinskis used their abandoned cages in storage - which had held animals, until the Nazis either relocated the beasts to German zoos or shot them - as waystations for the refugees, who'd just escaped a much harsher caged existence in the Warsaw Ghetto. It tells the story of the Zabinski family, who ran the Warsaw Zoo during the war and who secretly helped relocate hundreds of Jews fleeing German-occupied Poland. But The Zookeeper's Wife turns out to have a pretty good justification for equating the two. You'd think the absolute worst thing that a WWII movie could do is compare its huddled masses of Jews to animals. Borne, Freed: Jessica Chastain as the lion-hearted Antonina Zabinski in The Zookeeper's Wife.
0 kommentar(er)
