The Zookeeper’s Wife Review
Jessica Chastain deserved an Oscar nomination for her work in Miss Sloane (2016), and now she’s back at it again with The Zookeeper’s Wife, the story of a small zoo in Poland which under the most stressful of times managed to save hundreds of Jews from the ghettos and eventual death during WWII. It’s an amazing story based around actual events, and the film that goes along with it does rely on the sentiment of the Holocaust maybe one too many times during its two hour and six minute runtime, but for a crowd-pleasing Holocaust drama, you could do worse.
Our heroes in the story are Jan and Antonia Zabinska, a husband and wife who own a zoo in Warsaw, Poland. They live there with their young son Ryszard, but when the Nazis come to town, several bombs go off in the zoo leading to many animals dying, plus a few animals get loose and are shot. Eventually former friend Lutz Heck, who is also a zoologist, comes to the zoo and exterminates the remaining animals with few exceptions and plans on breeding an extinct animal back into existence. However, Jan and Antonia, whose hearts are in the right place with close friends of theirs being Jewish, so they decide to hide at first just a few Jews, but soon the zoo becomes a form of transportation for the Jews to get out of Warsaw throughout the rest of the German occupation.
Obviously any movie about the Holocaust is going to go for the emotions, and I really can’t complain about that. I mean, they wouldn’t make a movie set in slavery times where you root for the slavers, so why make a movie where you root for the Nazis? So while, as I mentioned earlier, there are a few moments here and there that rely too heavily on sentiment to drive at our hearts, there are just as many moments that also genuinely work. Niki Caro is the director, and she does an excellent job with the material. While the movie felt like it could have balanced the dramatic and at times depressing material with lighter fare, I guess too much light fare makes the subject matter not feel dramatic. Just sometimes it feels like there’s a joylessness, but I guess for the setting, that’s appropriate. Chastain does a good job as Antonia, and Johan Heldenbergh is a standout as Jan. I’d never heard of him before this, but I hope the guy gets lots of job offers. Daniel Bruhl is deliciously evil as Lutz, but not in a cheesy way. You genuinely feel hatred for him and the whole Nazi party, and he knows just when to hold back and when to overdo it. One thing, too that I liked is that the film doesn’t waste too much time getting to its subject matter. The first fifteen minutes or so are spent on the zoo’s day-to-day operations and an introduction to the characters before the German invasion and the eventual deaths of almost all the animals. The images of the animals being killed and sometimes remains of animals getting carried off are are strong, and while a few shots feel like they’re lingering on for too, you still feel the impact and emotion of the scene. And again, this is an amazing story of survival, and sure there are lots of those when it comes to the Holocaust, but I’m glad I saw this one.
That being said, there are some elements I didn’t quite get into. For one, the film does feel like it overstays its welcome. At two hours and six minutes long, the pacing was pretty good, but there comes a couple of points in the film that become a bit predictable. Things go so well for everybody and then you see in the third act the moments coming when everything could potentially go wrong. Again a lot of that just comes with the subject matter and the story they’re telling, but especially at the end there’s a scene or two that could have been cut. Also there were a few time when Chastain’s German accent started to slip a bit. It wasn’t terrible or anything, but it was noticeable. I mentioned it earlier, but there is a part where Bruhl’s character comes back and tries to breed some animals back into existence, and on top of that there’s this really lame attempt to create a love triangle between Antonia, Jan and Lutz, and that fails miserably. Again something that could have been left on the cutting room floor, but it does add a bit of dimension to Lutz without making him a hated Nazi, so while I get what they were going for, the execution was pretty sloppy.
So yeah, overall I think it’s an important story to tell and for the most part Niki Caro did an excellent job with bringing the story to the big screen while getting good or sometimes great performances out of her actors and bringing Jan and Antonia’s story out so that people like me who don’t know every story about the Holocaust can learn about it. I will say, though, for those out there who are looking to brings your kids and families to the film, the animals are only in the first fifteen minutes and in no way is it We Bought a Zoo Part II, and with all the violence and dark material, don’t take that PG-13 rating lightly. Also there is some nudity in the beginning of the film, too, so youngsters aren’t the key audience. For everyone else, though, especially those who enjoy history, you’ll probably enjoy this one. You might even shed a tear or two. Just because I didn’t doesn’t mean the emotions of the film don’t work. My screening was filled with kleenex blowing from start to finish.
My rating: 8/10.
