Alarming, but no Oscar nominees were harmed in the making of this movie. That scene, by the way, is stunning - an actress literally wrestling with a trunk in the middle of a performance. From the camel that follows her on her rounds to the lion cubs she lets sleep with their little boy (Timothy Radford), they adore her.Īnd when there’s trouble with an elephant calf’s birth, Antonina can be counted on to flee a dinner party, in party dress, to grapple with the calf and fend off the frightened, insistent and persistent trunk of the mother to save it. Jan is the scientist, respected by his peers. The result is a film with too many rough edges for kids, edges too polished and precious to connect with adults.Ĭhastain and Johan Heldenbergh are Antonina and Jan Zabinski, zookeepers of Poland’s most celebrated zoo. But director Niki Caro (“Whale Rider,” “McFarland, USA”) repeatedly jolts the viewer with graphic violence and almost comical sex, as if to say, “Thought this was for KIDS, didya?”
The zookeepers wife (2017) movie#
This could very well have slipped into “Here’s a movie that explains the Holocaust to children” genre, cuddly and kid-friendly. There are cute animals, tended to by a kind and gorgeous woman, played with earthy empathy by Jessica Chastain. “The Zookeeper’s Wife” slams into that conundrum, a true story of Warsaw zookeepers who smuggled Jews out of the ghetto, into their hidden animal paddocks and out of the city during the darkest days of World War II.īut from the very title you can guess the problems.
There is merit in a “Boy in the Striped Pajamas” or “The Book Thief.” But does that overcome the inherent cuteness of the telling? The risk, of course, is that the subject becomes trivialized, rendered trite and cute in the endless variations on a theme. There is no shortage of Holocaust stories that Hollywood wants to tell, and since they concern history’s ultimate “Never forget” horror, that is all well and good.
0 kommentar(er)
