The Zookeeper’s Wife

The title of Diane Ackerman’s nov­el, adapt­ed by Niki Caro, dou­bles down on good inten­tions. By the nature of their job a zookeep­er can only be a charm­ing per­son, and his wife, whose sto­ry has yet to be told, only more so as she stands by his side and in his shadow.

Jes­si­ca Chas­tain accord­ing­ly prof­fers all her nat­ur­al cute­ness and tal­ent (includ­ing a con­vinc­ing-enough Pol­ish accent) to the char­ac­ter of Anton­i­na Zabin­s­ki. She’s all colour­ful dress­es and hands-on care for the ele­phants, lions and oth­er ani­mals. Togeth­er with her lov­ing hus­band Jan (Johan Helden­bergh), she runs a pic­turesque zoo in War­saw. Yet the promise of show­ing the hero­ism of this ten­der but deter­mined woman when the Nazi inva­sion occurs in 1939 isn’t kept by a mean­der­ing and spine­less script.

Caro takes her time to first estab­lish the peace­ful­ness of the Zabin­skis’ life, then their under­stand­able hes­i­ta­tion to hide their per­se­cut­ed Jew­ish friends in their zoo. Yet rather than focus­ing on the tough moral dilem­mas faced by those want­i­ng to resist, the slow pac­ing and count­less shots of cute ani­mals and hard­work­ing zoo employ­ees trans­late as hes­i­ta­tion and lazy (and often laugh­able) but­ton-push­ing. After a while, even baby rab­bits and fun­ny-look­ing lamas can’t make up for a half-heart­ed devo­tion to the real­i­ty of resistance.

Antonina’s assured­ly heart­break­ing uncer­tain­ty indeed gets lost in the film’s smooth­ing out of the hor­ror she wit­ness­es. Caro dis­miss­es the very thing that makes this true sto­ry inter­est­ing, name­ly the ter­ri­fy­ing sit­u­a­tion that Anton­i­na refused to give in to. Depict­ing the bomb­ing of War­saw from the zoo makes nar­ra­tive sense, yet ignor­ing the human deaths is dis­turb­ing to say the least.

Once the War­saw ghet­to is estab­lished, Caro shows as lit­tle of it as pos­si­ble. Shots focussing on anony­mous extras play­ing their parts with an unfor­tu­nate but unmiss­able lack of tal­ent feel more like atmos­pher­ic images sup­posed to cre­ate a gen­er­al sense of mis­ery rather than gen­uine moments of con­cern for the lives lost to war. Hope for more direc­to­r­i­al human­i­ty briefly appears when Jan res­cues a lit­tle girl, Urszu­la (Shi­ra Haas), after her bru­tal rape by Nazi sol­diers. Antonina’s con­sol­ing words about lone­li­ness, how­ev­er, seem strange­ly out of line, and Haas’ well of com­plex emo­tions – chan­neled through a brief but great per­for­mance – remains untapped.

Aware that fur­ry beasts jux­ta­posed with per­se­cut­ed peo­ple may not make for a shock­ing-enough dis­crep­an­cy, Caro is care­ful to linger on Lutz Heck, the ani­mal-lov­ing Nazi offi­cer enter­ing in to the Zabin­skis’ lives and played with always-wel­comed sub­tle­ty by go-to Ger­man char­ac­ter actor Daniel Brühl. As the actor mix­es his youth­ful ami­a­bil­i­ty with a pal­pa­ble weak­ness, Lutz first appears as a real threat, more to the couple’s mar­riage than to their secret oper­a­tions, as an attrac­tion between him and Anton­i­na feels genuine.

That is, until the film, in a strange­ly vio­lent cli­mac­tic con­fronta­tion, bru­tal­ly shuts down any dilem­ma more emo­tion­al and per­son­al than the one imposed on them by her resis­tance work. Antonina’s moral and sen­ti­men­tal tor­ment is too schemat­ic and super­fi­cial. In Caro’s film, grey areas are sim­pli­fied into, most­ly, white. The more dis­turb­ing and not always resolv­able black, mean­while, has dis­ap­peared, hid­den away behind good sen­ti­ments and timidity.