Melodrama at the zoo

The Zookeeper’s Wife (in theaters March 31) begins delightfully, as Warsaw zookeeper Antonina Zabinski (Jessica Chastain) hops on her bicycle for her morning rounds at the zoo in 1939. A baby camel sprints behind her as she tours the zoo. Antonina moves comfortably and lovingly close to animals that could bite her head off.

Soon delight turns to terror, as German planes drop bombs on Warsaw, destroying the zoo. The bombs falling on the zoo is one of this movie’s best and scariest scenes, giving a new angle to World War II violence: The typically intimidating tiger runs scared from the sound of bombs, zebras are torn apart, and cubs are separated from parents.

Of course the violence to the animals is a prelude to the Nazi treatment of Jews as animals. The movie is inspired by the incredible true story of Jan and Antonina Zabinski, Warsaw zookeepers who hid 300 Jews in their zoo over the course of the Nazi occupation. The Germans found and killed only two of those 300.

The movie's cinematography is lovely, as is the acting ensemble. But heavy-handed, fictionalized subplots added to this historical story are so unnecessary they are galling. The Holocaust needs no added melodrama.

The movie earns a hard PG-13 rating, with violence, intimate sexual scenes between the husband and wife, brief nudity, a sexual assault, and an implied gang rape of a young girl off-screen. Some of those moments are important to the story, but most serve little purpose except to reduce the potential audience for this film.

The audience has few opportunities to catch a breath amid the relentless drama. Antonina has a lovely signature move of playing the piano at night to signal to the Jews in the basement that it is safe to emerge. The audience needs more slow moments with the piano.

The most over-the-top decision by the filmmakers was to turn Nazi zookeeper Lutz Heck—who already offers plenty in the villain department—into a sexual aggressor. Heck was a friend of the Zabinskis before the war, but after the German invasion he becomes a frenemy. He kills all the Zabinskis' surviving animals except a few precious breeds he agrees to take to Germany for “safekeeping.”

Throughout the movie Heck is sexually threatening to Antonina, culminating in one disturbing scene. Heck was a real person, and I can find nothing historically to support this characterization of him. Diane Ackerman’s book on which the movie is based refers to Heck as being “sweet” on Antonina—nothing beyond that.

The real Antonina had enough drama at the zoo to serve a film. The added subplot of her as a victim of Heck’s advances overwhelms the stories of the Jews—the movie’s worst offense. The plain history is powerful enough, and The Zookeeper’s Wife should have stuck to it.