Set in the Warsaw zoo during World War II, when Nazi Germany occupied Poland, Nicki Caro’s film has a sentimental sweep and lacks both rigour and a genuine understanding of its characters.
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The on-screen menagerie aren’t vivid accompanying detail – they’re too often a distraction.
First seen in the final peaceful summer of 1939, the zoo is a light-filled wonderland administered by Dr Jan Zabinski (Johan Heldenbergh) and his wife, Antonina (Jessica Chastain). He is the zookeeper, but she is the zoo’s soul, feeding apples to a hippopotamus, convening with staff and opening the gates to the waiting public. With their young son, Ryszard (Tim Radford and later Val Maloku), in tow, the zoo is an Eden awaiting despoilment.
The movie’s true animals arrive with the Nazi invasion. The horror of war is effectively conveyed in how the caged animals react to the terror of a bombing raid, galloping free only in some cases to be shot by worried Polish soldiers. It’s one of the few scenes that uses the zoo’s attractions for stark, striking means.
When the Nazis begin herding the city’s Jewish population into the Warsaw ghetto, the Zabinskis act. They hide Antonina’s best friend, Magda (Erfat Dor), and then Jan concocts a scheme to truck food scraps from the ghetto to feed pigs for the German supply lines. On his trips – with but limited suspense – Jews are smuggled out, hidden at the zoo under German noses and sent on their way with forged papers and disguises.
In adapting Diane Ackerman’s 2007 non-fiction book about the Zabinski’s heroic efforts, screenwriter Angela Workman and Caro carefully suggest the horrors of the Holocaust. Terrible acts happen just off screen, and while they don’t have to be shown, there is little sense of the nightmarish outcomes conveyed in those affected. The power of not showing something terrible is in the horrible uncertainty, but the film smooths too much over.
Caro, a New Zealander whose international breakthrough was 2002’s Whale Rider, has an eye for opening up insular communities, but the zoo is too serendipitous and even idyllic at times. With her alabaster skin, Chastain is a striking figure amid the wildlife, but her Antonina is cut off from the characters. Jan is much more engaged with the world outside but, as with the other supporting characters, you get little sense of his motivations or driving desires.
Certain sequences are stirring, but little accumulates in The Zookeeper's Wife. It’s hard to even tell, for example, what transpires between Antonina and Heck, whose animal husbandry techniques are as crude as his displays of affection.
