The email address you have provided is already registered. We even get to meet Janusz Korczak (Arnost Goldflam), who refuses Jan’s pleas that he join the fugitives at the zoo and instead boards the fateful train with his students. The burning of the ghetto and the expulsion of its inhabitants are depicted with an odd emotional detachment. We do get a glimpse of the daily dangers faced by Antonina, Jan and the people they are hiding, as well as of the horrors occurring at the Warsaw Ghetto. The result therefore feels more like an adventure than the commemoration of the Holocaust through the Zabinskis’ story.Ĭaro, it seems, wanted to make a moderate Holocaust melodrama that offers “inspirational” entertainment without unsettling the audience too much – if at all. Since the director gives us such superficial characters and portrays their dangerous work in such a placid manner, her movie generates no suspense, even at its most fateful moments. This crucial turning point is presented casually what interests Caro and her screenwriter, Angela Workman, who based the screenplay on Diane Ackerman’s best-selling nonfiction book from 2007, is only the heroic dimension of the act, not its motivations.ĭo the couple decide to save Jews because they love animals, and therefore also people (Antonina says at one point that she has more faith in animals than in humans)? We usually do not need an explanation for why a person performs a heroic deed but because Antonina and Jan are so threadbare in the movie, we need to know a little more about what drives them. This is especially evident at the moment when Antonina and Jan decide to risk their lives, and the life of their son, by helping the ghetto Jews. The pigs themselves will eat the garbage of the ghetto, an arrangement that allows Jan to enter the ghetto with his truck and smuggle out Jews – first children and then adults, some of whom stayed at the zoo for only a few days, while others spent the entire war there.Ĭaro turns this story into a Holocaust melodrama that only barely touches on its horrific historical background it offers two main protagonists that lack all depth. What makes this plan possible is Jan’s suggestion that Lutz Heck (Daniel Bruhl), a Nazi zoologist who takes over the zoo, turn it into a pig farm that will feed the German troops. This decision eventually leads to the couple’s further effort to get as many Jews as they can from the ghetto to the zoo, which is patrolled daily by German soldiers but is deserted at night. When the Jews of Warsaw are relocated to the ghetto, which strikes Antonina as just plain wrong – that’s the movie’s main emotional register – she convinces her husband that they should hide her best friend Magda (Israeli actress Efrat Dor). Some of the animals survive and flee to the streets of Warsaw others are killed in the bombings or shot by German soldiers. She also loves her husband and young son, who sleeps with two lion cubs by his side, but she doesn’t seem to look at them with the same amount of emotion as she does, say, the elephants. Were she to burst into song like an animated Disney heroinewhile making her morning rounds, we almost would not be surprised. Chastain plays Antonina as a woman glowing with love for the animals under her care. In the movie’s opening scene, we see the zoo in all its welcoming glory before the trouble begins. Antonina and Jan (played by Flemish actor Johan Heldenbergh with an accent of his own) ran the Warsaw Zoo when the Germans invaded Poland and World War II broke out. I focus on this seemingly trivial aspect of “The Zookeeper’s Wife” because it demonstrates the overall conventionality with which Caro presents the Zabinskis’ story, itself well worth commemorating. Holocaust survivors' strange and wonderful sojourn in ItalyĪ pilgrimage to Israel gave this Greek 'strength to spread the love' What shocked Jessica Chastain most when she visited Auschwitz Does the Polish intonation of Chastain’s English make her character more believable? I don’t understand why filmmakers persist in this practice after all, English is supposed to represent the Polish that Antonina actually spoke, and surely she did not speak it with an accent. Chastain – one of today’s leading American actresses, whom I like quite a bit, and who in this case also produced – chooses to perform her role in Polish-accented English. In “The Zookeeper’s Wife,” directed by New Zealander Niki Caro, Jessica Chastain plays Antonina Zabinska, who together with her husband Jan hid and saved the lives of over 300 Jews smuggled out of the Warsaw Ghetto. Jessica Chastain in 'The Zookeeper’s Wife.' Anne Marie Fox / Focus Features, LLC.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |