![]() ![]() Together, with the help of a loyal groundskeeper played by “Game of Thrones” alum Michael McElhatton, Jan and Antonina secretly begin transforming their shattered menagerie into a vital way station in the city’s underground railroad. Żabińska immediately default to the defense of life. So when the calendar flips to 1939 and the Germans swarm into Poland, leveling much of the Warsaw Zoo in a surreal scene that sends camels and tigers wandering through the metropolitan streets, Mr. Blessed with a maternal streak as fierce as mother nature’s itself, Antonina lets a lion cub sleep beside her young son, Ryszard, she lets a skunk move in to her bedroom, and - in an incredible first act sequence that vividly establishes her empathetic spirit - she even helps revive a suffocating baby elephant. The Holocaust alone offers more stories than we could ever hope to pass along - in Niki Caro’s beautifully realized and occasionally stirring “The Zookeeper’s Wife,” even the animals have their own tales to tell.Īdapted from Diane Ackerman’s book of the same name, Caro’s most vivid and complete film since “Whale Rider” relays the remarkable true story Antonina and Jan Żabińska ( Jessica Chastain and “The Broken Circle Breakdown” star Johan Heldenbergh), the kind-hearted goyim who ran the Warsaw Zoo during the Nazi occupation and spared some love for every species of guest whom they invited onto their sprawling property.Īntonina, a regal sort of woman who assumes a different, more domestic kind of heroism than we’re used to seeing in films about the resistance, is depicted as being particularly protective of all God’s creatures. It may seem a bit obvious given the global scope of the conflict, but the sheer number of narratives that have emerged from the period is truly mind-boggling, bordering on the infinite, and it often feels as though most of them have made their way in front of a camera. ![]() We may never run out of movies to make about World War II, the people who lived through it, and the people who didn’t. ![]()
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