Steve Zahn may be one of those actors who is forever doomed to be known as one of cinema’s quintessential “that guys.” He’s the type of actor who seems to show up in all sorts of projects, and generally steals the few scenes that he’s granted. Looking at Zahn’s track record speaks to the extraordinary range that he has as a performer. Who else could play the comedic oaf in You’ve Got Mail, a charming musician in That Thing You Do!, the overworked dad in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid family films, and an imprisoned ape dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder in War for the Planet of the Apes with the same level of seasoned commitment? Whether he’s working with the most prestigious of directors or the most absurd comedies, Zahn shows no less dedication. However, he truly showed his brilliance thanks to the equally versatile nature of director Werner Herzog in the riveting 2006 war film Rescue Dawn.

Werner Herzog and Steve Zahn Are an Excellent Pairing
MGM

In many ways, Werner Herzog’s workmanlike quality as a director seems like the perfect fit for Zahn due to their shared interest in experimentation and ability to “pay the bills” when necessary. Herzog has been a legend of cinema since his early days working on war epics like Aguirre, The Wrath of God, a film renowned for its incredible attention to detail and realism. Although it found favor among critics like Roger Ebert, Aguirre, The Wrath of God isn’t a traditional war film in any sense, as it replaces the traditional conventions of dramatic cinema with a gritty form of cinéma vérité that places the audience right in the middle of the action, in a quasi-docudrama style. Despite the groundbreaking nature of his work, Herzog wasn’t above popping into episodes of The Mandalorian or playing a bad guy in Jack Reacher.

Rescue Dawn follows the incredible true story of the German-American pilot Dieter Dengler (Christian Bale), whose plane was shot down during a pivotal stage of the Vietnam War. Villagers sympathetic to Pathet Lao capture Denglar, who is imprisoned with several other starved American pilots who the locals have captured. Zahn’s Lieutenant Duane W. Martin and Jeremy Davies’ Sergeant Gene DeBruin have been imprisoned so long during the campaign that they have virtually no semblance of reality or ability to offer Denglar hope. In many ways, seeing Zahn’s Martin simply explain the daily realities of imprisonment to Denglar feels like the first time that he’s had any normal interaction with someone in years.

RELATED: We All Need to Admit That We Failed Steve Zahn

Similar to what Zahn would do with “Bad Ape” in War for the Planet of the Apes, he shows in Rescue Dawn someone suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder who has reverted to a sickly state as a result of the brutality that he’s endured. Martin has already been beaten, starved, and tortured, and like Bad Ape, he has to now accept that he hasn’t “worked past” the hard part at all; this is just what his reality looks like now. While Bad Ape is able to cope with his circumstances with a sense of humor in War for the Planet of the Apes, that’s because he has a new inspirational figure in the form of Andy Serkis’ Caesar. Denglar is just as deprived of resources and denied of hope as Martin is. The only way for Martin to cope with his reality is through a wistful state of mournfulness, which Zahn delivers with heartbreaking subtlety.

Working With The Best
MGM

To walk away from Rescue Dawn impressed by Zahn’s physicality is a credit to his brilliance as a dramatic actor when considering who his co-stars are. Bale’s transformations of his own body are practically what he built his career on. Whether it was starving himself for The Machinist, transforming into a literal superhero for The Dark Knight trilogy, starving himself again to play a drug addict in The Fighter, gaining excessive weight for American Hustle and Vice, and then shedding weight for his slimmed-down role in Ford v. Ferrari, it’s almost scary to see what Bale is willing to do to his own body. Bale certainly had to show his fair share of physicality in Rescue Dawn, but what Zahn does is perhaps even more impressive because of the stark nature of how Herzog shoots it; he’s decidedly not calling attention to it in the way that a more obvious filmmaker like David O. Russell or Adam McKay might have.

The difference between them is that the viewer knows what Denglar looked like before the crash; they’ve seen him at his peak flying in the height of combat, and they get hints of his inspirational quality as he tries to give Martin some insight on how the Americans are supposedly “winning” a war that clearly has no end in sight. They only meet Martin when he’s past the point of social or physical competence, and Zahn is able to imply a history of abuse, trauma, and service through a performance that is nearly wordless. There’s no groundbreaking moment or expositional dump where he “explains” everything that he’s gone through to Denglar. They simply have to live with the reality of their circumstances, and there’s not really any time to consider whether these men would ever be friends otherwise. They’re cut down to their most primal impulses in order to survive. Zahn shows through Martin’s lack of personality that whatever type of man he once bore little in common with the disheveled prisoner that exists now.

Rescue Dawn, like many of Herzog’s films, isn’t an “easy” film in any way, and as a result of that, Zahn’s performance isn’t the type of over-the-top acting that vies for prizes with awards voting bodies. It’s easy to reduce the complexities of conflict to a simple inspirational message, but Rescue Dawn doesn’t take a stance; it simply presents reality as it exists. That’s a result of actors like Zahn, who captures a lifetime of suffering and anguish in only the briefest of moments.