The decline of a major artist is always a sad event, and Little Dieter Needs to Fly, from Germany (where it is more sensibly titled Flucht aus Laos—Flight from Laos), France and the United Kingdom, testifies to the near disintegration of Werner Herzog’s once considerable talent.* Each of his great works from the late 1960s through the mid-1970s exploring extremes of human experience actually slide along a blurred boundary that conflates fiction and documentary. So it is with Little Dieter, in which (as he did with Fini Straubinger, the elderly woman who has been deaf and blind since adolescence, in Land of Silence and Darkness, 1971) Herzog has mixed the experience of his subject, Dieter Dengler, with his own, in some instances scripting Dengler’s remarks. Dengler’s life experience is, again, extreme; during the Vietnam War, as a U.S. Navy pilot, he was a prisoner of the Viet Cong, from which he eventually daringly escaped. Herzog, then, is still, essentially, Herzog, both thematically and stylistically. But the spark is out.
Dengler is not the sympathetic, humane figure that Fini Straubinger is in Land des Schweigens und der Dunkelheit—the astonishing Land of Silence and Darkness. He is a nut; the son of a German officer during World War II, he immigrated at 18 to the United States solely to be able to pilot airplanes (the outcome of the war left Germany without an air force), and now, some sort of businessman living in a house he himself designed high on top of a mountain, he stockpiles vast amounts of food in his cellar, like a survivalist. He routinely lies about his war experience, for instance, detailing a gruesome incident—this film is chock full of graphic, offensive “recollections”—in which one member of the Viet Cong chopped off the digit of another member in order to return to their prisoner, Dengler, his confiscated engagement ring. Sliced off, I would have believed; but no such “chopping” as Dengler describes could have managed to eliminate only one finger. (Could this whole film be some sort of grotesque hoax?) Nothing he says suggests that Dengler has changed his mind about the rightness of the U.S. invasion of Southeast Asia, and it’s quite possible, in some sarcastic way, that Herzog means to suggest “like father, like son,” that is to say, that Dengler was as wrong about his war as his father had been about his war. If so, none of this reaches us. Herzog, whose voiceover attempts to lend the film continuity, seems to admire his subject, who several times strikes us as being insane, and surely strikes us as brutal and cruel—not just back then, but now. Herzog uses Dengler’s “second thoughts” about the harm done to innocent villagers as a launching pad for the kind of visual antiwar rhetioric—sweeping aerial shots of bombings of the land below—that so consistently damages Lessons of Darkness (1992). Such grandiose rhetoric isn’t any the less empty for being on the side of the angels.
Indeed, there is simply too much ersatz spirituality infused into this film, and I felt that if the tune we have come to call “Going Home,” from Dvorak’s New World Symphony, swelled up on the soundtrack one more time I would scream.
Herzog tries structuring his material into four chapters; the last one is called “Redemption.” Again, Herzog is employing a tack he has used before. Here, though, it seems arbitrarily imposed.
There are a number of beautiful images in the film; with Herzog, there always are. One, identified by Herzog as a mirage, attempts to reconstruct Dengler’s vision of the U.S. once he had been rescued from the Laotian jungle and brought home.
In 2004, Herzog added a postscript showing moments from Dengler’s 2001 military funeral. Dengler was buried, with full honors, in Arlington National Cemetery. We recall that Dengler once dismissed the idea that he was a hero, saying that only the dead can truly be called heroes. However, the real shock that this postscript delivers is the appearance of Dengler’s wife and son, who, for whatever reason, Herzog declined to mention, much less show, in his 1997 film. (The widow is not the person attached to the engagement ring that presumably cost a Viet Cong his finger.)
If it is indeed true (it’s hard to believe any of this movie), I did not know that sons of Second World War German soldiers could gain entry to the United States just because they wanted to fly. Strange country.
* Happily, it appears I prematurely wrote off Herzog’s talent. Herzog has made a couple of good documentaries since updating Little Dieter.
Dennis Grunes 