COMMON SENSE MEDIA REVIEW OF THE ZOOKEEPERS WIFE MOVIE
Or, if that may not be fair (and perhaps it's not as it's well-shot and has some interesting and effective spurts of montage editing - not throughout, but at times), it's a soft movie, the kind of holocaust-period-WW2 movie I'd be perfectly fine showing kids in a middle school class or even to 4th graders to teach them a little about the period it's set in in 1939-1946 Warsaw, Poland. Maybe it's because of films like Son of Saul not being too far removed in recent memory, but something like The Zookeeper's Wife seems like weak tea in comparison. Good movie of a heroic effort during a dark chapter in the world's history. Both of them died in the 1970s but the two young children depicted in the movie grew up and are featured in a short "extra" on the DVD.
Antonia and her husband were a real couple and they did what is depicted in the movie. However if she played during the day that was a signal for them to hide and not make a sound. Antonina played piano and they had a code, when she played late at night that meant the Nazi patrol had gone by and the Jews were welcome to come out and enjoy the whole house. Most of them were there for only a short time but some were there for the duration. It is said that over the course of the war the number reached 300 people. As it became clear that the Nazi occupation also meant driving Jews into their ghettos, and ultimately to their destruction, she and her husband got involved with smuggling Jews out of the city and into the basement of their home at the zoo. The movie's title focuses on the efforts of Jessica Chastain as Antonina Zabinska, who was the wife of the Warsaw Zoo's keeper. This movie spans roughly 7 years, from 1939 until a year after WW2 ends. "The war won't last long", he says, "the Allies are weak." However as we now know the war persisted until the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945. Many animals are killed, some escape, some are taken for food, and a Nazi officer offers to transfer many of them to the Berlin Zoo for safe keeping. A bombing raid includes the Warsaw Zoo as a target. It is 1939 and Nazi Germans occupy Poland. In one sense the movie is hard to watch as it rehashes issues that many of us have seen represented in a number of movies over the years. My wife and I watched this movie at home on DVD from our public library. Jessica Chastain puts on one of the finest performances of her career. It reminds us that there is good in us all. Yad Vashem eventually recognized the Żabińskis as part of the Polish Righteous Among the Nations. I guess that everywhere in Europe there were both collaborators and people who helped the Jews. A similar movie that I saw was Agnieszka Holland's "In Darkness", about a sewer worker who used his knowledge of Warsaw's sewer system to help the Jews hide there. The Nazis cleared the Warsaw Zoo of animals, and so the Żabińskis helped Jan's Jewish colleagues into the zoo, where the latter stayed during the occupation. In this case, the protagonist is Antonina Żabiński, who with her husband Jan harbored a number of Jews during the Nazi occupation of Poland. But I'd say that an important point that the movie makes is that everywhere in Europe there were people who stood up to the Third Reich. On the one hand we could call "The Zookeeper's Wife" another movie about the Nazis' actions. I can overlook most of that and there is a compelling story underneath. They could call it a Human Zoo and that would be much better. Everybody should speak in a neutral manner. It's just silly to have characters speak English but in an accent. The accented English needs to be reduced if not eliminated all together. Sometimes like the little kids is too much. It's not new but still very much worth telling.
This allows Jan access to the ghetto which he uses to save some 300 Jews right under Heck's nose. The Zabinskis try to befriend Heck and convinces him to allow them to raise pigs in the zoo.
Nazi zoologist Lutz Heck convinces Antonina to transfer her prized animals to Berlin. When the war starts, the zoo is not spared. Antonina (Jessica Chastain) and Jan Zabinski run the Warsaw Zoo.
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