The Zookeeper's Wife
by Angela Workman (screenplay) & Diane Ackerman (book)
Scion Films
TW for rape, animal harm, and the general shitbaggery of Nazi occupation of Poland during WWII.
I’m gonna be straight up with you here: this is a difficult watch. It’s a movie about the Holocaust, so that’s one layer, but it’s also about a zoo in wartime. And it’s about an occupied city in wartime. There’s also a young girl who gets raped, so if you want to tap out right here, I don’t blame you.
The Zookeeper’s Wife is about Antonina Żabiński and her husband Jan, who ran the Warsaw Zoo up to WWII. During the war, the vast majority of the animals were killed or sent to Germany, and they raised pigs….and also sheltered over 300 Jewish people that were smuggled out of the Warsaw Ghetto to safety. The epilogue tells us that only two out of the over 300 were found and killed- the rest survived the war. It’s directed by Niki Caro, who you may remember as the director of Whale Rider, and written by Angela Workman.
Jessica Chastain plays Antonina, a woman with a remarkable affinity for animals, and only slightly less affinity for managing logistics under pressure. This is a handy skill to have when running a zoo, and it’s invaluable when one is part of the Polish Resistance and hiding Jewish people in the basement. Her husband Jan (Johan Heldenbergh) also is good at logistics, and has a strong sense of “you do what’s right, and deal with the consequences as they come.” They have a young son who grows up with lion cubs in his bedroom, and then people hidden in his basement, and while there’s some typical rebellion, he understands that this is much bigger than any adolescent frustrations he has.
They begin hiding people when their Jewish best friends ask them to store a few prized possessions (it’s an insect collection) and they agree that they could hide one of them. Then they begin smuggling people out of the Ghetto and hiding them in the animal pens, with the help of many other people.
The primary antagonist is Lutz Heck (Daniel Brühl), Hitler’s chief zoologist who, after the zoo is bombed during the invasion of Poland, generously offers to take the prize specimens to Berlin (“for safekeeping, I’ll totally return them after the war!”) and then wants to use the bison to resurrect an extinct species (no, I don’t understand how he planned to pull that off, but it’s a thing the historical Heck tried to do). He’s a Nazi through and through, and has this thing for Antonina and it’s pretty gross.
Okay, so while I thought this was a well done movie, and while I think the message of “do the right thing- you know what that is” is important, and while I, as ever, applaud movies by and about women, I feel like I have to offer up a bunch of caveats.
First: most of the animals at the zoo don’t survive. And it’s upsetting. It’s supposed to be – no one is pretending that they aren’t innocent victims, but watching a polar bear get bombed wasn’t high on my list of things to see. The animals that survive the bombing and don’t get sent to Berlin are culled. It’s absolutely tragic and heartbreaking.
Second: We all know how to story of the Warsaw Ghetto ends. We know how the story of the Holocaust goes. While the Żabińskis helped save over 300, there are so many more who were not saved.
Third, and this is the one I wasn’t prepared for:
I don’t want anyone to feel surprised by this. I do think Niki Caro, the director, handled the aftermath well. Urszula is given everything the Żabińskis can give her to heal: time and space and quiet and as much safety as they could provide and a bunny to cuddle. No one tries to make her do anything she isn’t ready to do. She comes through on her own terms and her own time.
In terms of our present political state, the message of doing the right thing because it’s the right thing to do begins simply. They begin hiding someone because the person they’re hiding their friend. They keep doing it because fuck every part of this. In dark times, you have to take every bit of good you can, and I found it to be heartening how many people were in the network trying to save as many people as they could. And there were even more who knew what was being done and while they may not have had the intestinal fortitude to actively help, they weren’t going to turn anyone in, either.
I don’t know if people are inherently good or not. But I do know that we have a lot of stories of people who chose, over and over and over again, to do the right thing, even when that choice was inhumanly difficult. And those are stories we need right now, and they give me hope.
That was really heavy and a lot, so let me leave you with the Cincinnati Zoo’s baby hippo, Fiona. Isn’t she adorable?
Fiona relaxes on her inflatable pool float. Hippos don't float/swim. They walk along the bottom & propel to the surface for air #TeamFiona pic.twitter.com/dsEGXJhsB4
— Cincinnati Zoo (@CincinnatiZoo) April 2, 2017
The Zookeeper’s Wife is in theaters now and you can find tickets (US) at Fandango and Moviefone.
RGH Thank you SO DAMN MUCH for doing this review! I was so interested in this seeing this film, but after reading about some of the trigger warnings I know I’d end up leaving the theater in a bit of a panic.
I’m going to give this one a soft pass so thank you for saving my money and my mental well being. For those that can experience this movie okay, I hope they do! Films that by and about women, especially ones who do the right thing when everything is telling them not to, is so goddamn important.
Stupid fingers. RHG, not RGH. Now my brain is thinking Redgirlheaded, which is making me laugh.
Echoing everything Jacqueline said. Thank you for the review!
Thank you for the review. It wasn’t a movie that I had any interest in to begin with (Zoo animals during wartime = Whole Lotta Nope), but I find that a lot of reviewers might warn about violence and bad things happening to humans in books and movies, but the warnings about violence and bad things happening to animals sometimes don’t get made. I can deal with horrific things happening to people in books, movies, t.v., you name it, but hurting an animal – even off-screen, even when I KNOW it’s fiction, even if the animal is “o.k.” in the end – is a big, fat, deal-breaker for me. So thanks.
Thank you. I was contemplating seeing this but, for whatever reason, seeing animals harmed is just over my limit. I’ll pass.
Zoos in wartime are horribly doomed and I have no interest in reading/viewing, have seen quite enough about animals starving to death in Iraq and Syria. Add WWII and nope.
Adding my thanks for your clear and direct trigger warnings, especially for animal abuse. I wanted to see this movie, but I don’t think I could handle it.
I wish Hollywood could find another go-to Nazi besides poor Daniel Brühl. He’s so lovely and talented and gorgeous and it breaks my Jewish-girl heart to see him as a Nazi all the time!
Thanks for the review. I probably will see this—it seems even more important right now, given current events (and the number of Holocaust deniers out there). But I’ll definitely wait until it comes out on dvd, because I know I will melt down.
Thank you. I won’t be watching this because animal harm and rape, but i do think it’s an important story to tell and i appreciate the perspective.
@Rose – check out Goodbye, Lenin for a wonderful role for Daniel Brühl. He’s also the title character Salvador Puig Antich in the movie Salvador, though it does not end well for him.
I’m as squeamish as the next person, and more so than most, but I confess that I’m troubled by the notion that somehow animal death is more upsetting than human death. It’s a film about the Warsaw Ghetto. And the thing that really worries people are the polar bears? What does it say about us as a species that we’re quick to recognize other species as innocent victims, but somehow dissociate ourselves from human suffering? There’s a lot of talk about “de-humanizing” people, but it seems like we’re MORE willing to see violence against humans. Do we have some kind of mental mechanism that makes us think “well people must have done something to deserve it?” That worries me.
@Rebecca Goodbye, Lenin was the movie that made me fall in love with Daniel Brühl! I watched it about half a dozen times years ago when I was first learning German. I adored him in it.
I am incredibly disappointed in this review.
As background: there’s a lot of discussion in Jewish circles right now over this movie, and a lot of us are questioning why major English-language movies about the Holocaust put gentiles at the centre of it. Schindler’s List, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, The Book Thief, and now this one prioritize the moral agony of gentiles over our wholesale murder and literal genocide. We exist only as victims that are either saved by heroic gentiles, or killed to teach gentiles a lesson about doing the right thing. Yes, righteous gentiles were heroes and their stories are true, but there are a far, far greater number of true stories about victims that deserve to be told. That’s where I’m starting from.
So the review. I understand that the movie is what it is. You reviewed a movie about Antonia and Jan, so you wrote about them. But your review prioritizes the suffering of animals over that of Jews. Putting the spoiler box aside, seven-ish sentences in this review mention Jews. Seven. Your language ranges from neutral at best, to evasive (“sheltered over 300 Jewish people that were smuggled out of the Warsaw Ghetto to safety” “We all know how the story of the Holocaust goes”). Compare that with with your greater word-count and language around animals, which is graphic and emotional (“And it’s upsetting” “[…] watching a polar bear get bombed wasn’t high on my list of things to see.” “It’s absolutely tragic and heartbreaking”).
Not only that, in this review that is LITERALLY placed about the death of Jews. Literally. As if the fact that a zoo was bombed was a greater impediment to your enjoyment of the film than the fact that the Warsaw Ghetto saw nearly 400 000 Jews die within its walls or after being transported to death camps. And judging by the comments, many people are more disturbed by the suffering of animals than by the suffering of Jews. I hope I don’t need to spell out how absolutely effed-up that is. And how terribly much that attitude has in common with that of, you know, the actual Nazis, who certainly saw us as less than animals. Which, to be clear, RHG, I don’t think you or any other commenters really are, and I’m not accusing you of it.
You’ve accidentally written something very problematic. I would like to think that’s it’s because you’re so violently uncomfortable with the facts of the Holocaust that you didn’t want to mentally tackle it. But you can’t give throw-away lines, because not everyone knows how the Holocaust went. Not everyone knows about the Warsaw ghetto. Anti-Semitism, neo-Nazis, and Holocaust denial are on the rise. We need every ally we can get, and today you really failed to be one.
I have more concern over the suffering of non-human animals than human animals because non-human animals are powerless. I believe that non-human animals removed from their environments and caged in a zoo for human enjoyment deserve a higher level of care than a non-human animal in its natural environment.
I fully agree with @Hannah. I am German and not Jewish, so not the same emotional impact but feel the need to comment in suport. Why is animal cruelty in a *Holocaust movie* the dealbreaker? I can also see how the story is problematic (Poland had its own issues with antisemitism). Not defending Germany’s actions at all by pointing out antisemitism is a worldwide thing. Hitler was democratically elected and the majority clearly didn’t care enough or believed the propaganda, so the guilt is clear. Normal people can be Nazis, now they are reduced to trope movie villains and perpetrate the myth that of course we Gentiles now all would see through it or be part of the resistance and hiding people. Based on recent newsbit seems people are very much the same – which is frightening, and I cannot even imagine how it feels for Jews Maybe the movie deals with this, but the review doesn’t mention it.
I’m not going to apologize for animal suffering being a bigger trigger for me than human – and I was molested and tortured as a child, so don’t try and tell me what suffering is. People’s triggers are what they are, and given the number of people who chimed in about the animal abuse, it’s obviously real enough to enough people. Because apparently it’s not “real” if only one person feels it.
I wanted to add: what is a trigger is of course personal as well as how much someone can’t deal with it, and it is useful to include it as a warning in the review, I just think it shouldn’t feature as much in the review itself?
@Hannahs and Mona – Thank you for saying more eloquently what troubled me about this review that I couldn’t quite put my finger on.
@LML – So you’re arguing that the people in the Warsaw Ghetto in the early 40s, or in Syria or Yemen today have more “power” than zoo animals because they’re in their “natural environment”? Sure, humans in those circumstances have more power than zoo creatures in the sense that they may be more able to actively choose suicide (and the heroes of the Warsaw Uprising certainly chose to have a kind of desperate agency). But the idea that because you can choose to die fighting as opposed to passively starving to death or being massacred makes you LESS worthy of compassion is….not one I share.
@Ellie – No one needs to apologize for any triggers. The sound of a door slamming, or a certain smell can be a trigger, and they are intensely personal and need not be shared by anyone to be real. But elevating non-human suffering above human suffering as more important for some ethical reason involving relative power strikes me as a dangerous step toward saying that some kinds of suffering don’t “count” because their victims are somehow not sufficiently “innocent” or are “undeserving” in some way.
@Mona
Thanks for your comment. I definitely feel that Europe likes to pretend that the Holocaust was solely perpetrated by Germany and everyone else would have looooved to defend their Jews and were just plain victims. Anti-Semitism was, and is, worldwide and is rising in Europe partly BECAUSE so many people refuse to see themselves as the perpetrators of it.
@ LML and Ellie
I really second what Rebecca said. If you’ll re-read my comment, you’ll see that I’m not down-playing the suffering as animals, nor am I trying to take away your love and defense of them. Nor do you need to apologize for being upset and triggered by animals being mistreated. What I AM saying is that saying “I am more upset by the suffering of a polar bear than by the suffering of Jews” is saying that Jews are less important than animals. This is anti-Semitism. Neither of you or RHG said it, but you all implied it. That’s the problematic part.
Hannah, you have given me a lot to think about. While I do that (and I am), please accept my heartfelt apology for causing you pain. It was not my intention, but I did, and for that I am sorry.
I want to add my apology here as well. I read and edited this review, and was focused more on making sure any and all potentially upsetting aspects were mentioned. So I didn’t catch the larger context, that again a film about the Holocaust focused on how gentiles felt about it. I am deeply embarrassed that this is the case, and I apologize.