More than 70 years after the cessation of the world’s most high-profile atrocity, it’s crucial to apply a certain distrust to films about the Holocaust, with the understanding that, as they’re taking the quickest available shortcut to instant pathos, the motives behind these movies may not always be purely (or coherently) conceived. As Jacques Rivette famously outlined in his review of Gillo Pontecorvo’s Kapò, there’s also the issue of whether the exploitation inherent to cinematically dramatizing any event becomes intolerable when that event is the industrialized slaughter of millions of innocent people. The question of what level of exploitation is acceptable of course falls to each individual viewer, and it’s worth noting that the tragedy’s potential as a catalyst for reinvigorating compassion remains strong, even if it’s rare for films to match the genocide’s scope with any equivalent sense for provoking such feelings. Still, renewed empathy is now needed more than ever in contemporary America, a place where the same rancid blood and soil nationalism that motivated the rise of the Nazi Party is somehow again on the upswing, a situation that lends an increased significance to films focused on the moral exigencies of intervening to stop the suffering of others.
The Zookeeper’s Wife is also useful, despite its often humdrum presentation, as a reminder of how sunny things can look even at the precipice of total war. Spending her days in the thrumming Edenic paradise of the Warsaw Zoo, titular spouse Antonina (Jessica Chastain) is less a witness to its operations than an equal partner, soothing nervous creatures and midwifing elephant births. The zoo is a place where lion cubs laze in Antonina’s bed and camels dash freely about the grounds, yet one that’s also unfortunately located in the direct path of a mounting Nazi war machine. It’s not long before the invaders roll into town, first via a bombing run that lays the entire facility to waste, snarling cage bars and blowing helpless exotic creatures to bits. German foot soldiers arrive soon after, engaging in the expected sorts of dastardly behavior, plundering what’s left of the post-Blitzkrieg animal stock, consigning the rest to be destroyed for feed.
Robbed of her furry companions, the exceedingly empathetic Antonina proceeds to build an ark right under the Nazi’s noses, one in which people substitute for beasts, a process which helps restore their inherent humanity after the brutal indignities of the Warsaw Ghetto. As in Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus, the film’s symbology is primarily routed through the transference of animal traits onto its characters. This occurs most notably in the visual parallels drawn between the Nazis and the pigs they import into the zoo, which transitions from a public research center to a massive urban farm. Chief among these porcine occupiers is mustachioed zoologist and Nazi officer Lutz Heck (Daniel Brühl), whose passion project involves the reverse-breeding of aurochs, an extinct species of European bison that’s imagined as a symbol of Aryan fortitude.
While consistently underdeveloped, the film’s insistent animal allegories find their clearest expression in this central conflict, as a battle between the heroes’ desire to preserve and sustain life and the interlopers’ craving to cruelly master and subject it. Heck’s introductory anecdote, given at a pre-war cocktail party at which the German gentleman seems like just another charming intellectual, involves the shooting of a man-eating lion and his subsequent rescue of her cubs. Soon after, in an indication that his motives might not be as pure as he claims, he’s seen blasting a bald eagle with a Luger, a visual metaphor that in a movie about America would seem hopelessly overwrought, and even here comes off as clumsy. Later that eagle shows up in the man’s office, frozen in a dumbly heroic pose. In a portrayal that seems to have some roots in the Indiana Jones series, the Nazis here are needlessly confirmed as ruthless graspers who prefer dead versions of things under their immediate control to live ones left to their own devices.
Antonina’s struggle to modestly entertain Heck’s ham-handed affections in order to keep her hidden charges safe functions as the film’s other primary conflict, and while its depiction of expediency clashing with revulsion is at times persuasive, it eventually feels like a distraction from more compelling sections of the narrative. The Jewish boarders, meanwhile, are left undeveloped and treated with an overall sense of pat flatness, empty canvases upon which damage can be painted on broadly, then scrubbed clean by the heroine’s gentle, humanizing touch. The Zookeeper’s Wife does verge on an interesting perspective on this condition at times, specifically in its treatment of trauma as its own form of ossifying infiltration, working its way into small fractures of personal relationships. This emotional acuity, combined with some novel ideas, a few glimmers of genuine suspense, generally competent direction and an acute eye for process (the intricate system by which the Jews are rescued from the ghetto is fascinating, and precisely presented) leaves the film feeling satisfying if not especially original, particularly at a time when the importance of aiding those who need the most help again requires emphasizing.
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