The Zookeeper's Wife

Here is a movie that is let down by its own lack of ambition.  The Zookeeper's Wife treats the Holocaust almost as a cliche.  It derives from numerous other movies about the subject, and never finds a unique tone or angle.  Based on the true story of Antonina and Jan Zabinski (portrayed on the screen by Jessica Chastain and Johan Heldenberg, respectively), a husband and wife who ran the Warsaw Zoo during World War II and used it to hide numerous Jews, the movie's attempts to be uplifting are squandered on a rather underdeveloped screenplay.

Maybe it's because I had just seen The Promise (a somewhat flawed, but much better film about surviving in war time) just a few days before this made it seem all the more bland to me.  But, I really do think something is off here.  The movie tries to span a time of seven years or so in roughly two hours, and this leads to some gaping plot holes or continuity issues.  In one glaring example, a scene depicts Antonina giving birth, when there had been absolutely no mention or indication of her being pregnant at any time in the film leading up to it.  And rather than tell a basic human story about survival, the movie goes for melodrama, and has to throw a mustache-twirling villain into the mix (Daniel Bruhl, playing a standard movie Nazi).  Bruhl chews the scenery every chance he gets, while none of the rest of the cast get to stand out quite as much.

That includes Jessica Chastain, who plays Antonina as a quiet and all too meek woman who never quite grabbed my attention as a lead character.  Chastain is an incredibly gifted actress, but here she gets saddled not only with an uninteresting character, but she's forced to speak with an accent that makes some of her dialogue hard to follow.  It would help if the movie gave us a better feel for her, or perhaps a better grasp on her relationship with her husband.  Heldenberg is fine enough as Jan, but he doesn't get a lot of screentime, and his role seems underwritten.  There's really nothing to complain about in terms of performances.  These fine actors are simply fighting a losing battle with a script by Angela Workman.  She glosses over facts, hits a lot of the same notes other movies have, and just doesn't give us enough to care about these people like we should.

There is simply not enough emotional power on display to make The Zookeeper's Wife stand out.  This movie would probably be fine enough to show to preteens in a Middle School History classroom, but I doubt many adults will find much new here.  When the Nazis occupy Poland, and begin to use the Warsaw Zoo as a base for lab experiments and to breed meat for their soldiers, we do get a few shocking scenes of the soldiers killing the zoo animals that they believe will not survive or are not any use to them.  This is the closest the movie comes to working, as it's something we haven't seen before.  But then, it falls into a fairly conventional melodrama about the Zabinskis using the area beneath their home on the zoo grounds to hide Jewish families, and provide a secret escape route.  Again, we learn very little about the people whose lives they are saving.  The closest the movie comes to giving us anything is a frightened little girl who has been traumatized to the point she is mute at first.  But once she begins to talk, the movie basically forgets about her, and she only shows up as an extra for the rest of the film.

I would blame the somewhat watered down tone of the film on the fact that it is viewing the Holocaust through a PG-13 lens, but again, I must refer back to The Promise.  That movie shares the exact same rating, and it did not shy away from the brutality.  Was it censored in some form?  Most certainly, as there was a suspicious lack of blood in many of the scenes depicting mass graves.  But the point is that movie actually showed the atrocities.  This movie shies away from a lot of the harder images.  Yes, we see soldiers leading people out of their homes or setting fire to buildings, but we seldom see the aftermath.  Maybe the movie is trying to be uplifting, but if you have to hide the truth in order to put your audience in a better mood, you're not doing your job right. 

The Zookeeper's Wife simply tries to cover too much material in too short amount of time, and the characters and narrative greatly suffer.  I'm sure a wonderful documentary could have been made from this story, and I hope one exists.  I was kind of interested in the story, just not the way this film decided to tell it.

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