The Zookeeper's Wife (2017)

Antonina Żabińska kept a zoo in Warsaw, and when the Germans arrived she kept people in it. Niki Caro directs this adaptation of Diane Ackerman's book, with Angela Workman handling the screenplay, and Jessica Chastain occupying the center of nearly every frame. The behind-the-camera roster is notably female, and critics at the time reached for the phrase feminist Holocaust film. That label sits comfortably enough. The story belongs to a woman who moves through occupation by tending frightened creatures, human and otherwise, and the film observes her without ever stopping to announce its own virtue.

The historical record is treated with respect. There is no mischievous reordering of events, no invented villain psychology beyond the exaggerated rivalry the film admits to, no attempt to smuggle a modern grievance into 1940s Poland. The antisemitism on display is the documented kind, not a lecture about our own moment. Rescue is the subject, and the postscript makes the moral explicit for anyone who missed it. Elsewhere the film keeps its mouth mostly shut, which is rarer than it should be.

Which is not to say it is a triumph. Reviews were mixed, the takedown of choice being that the animals upstage the people, and the accusation lands. The film is earnest, well-mounted, and a little airless. Its progressive instincts are of the older, quieter sort: a woman's perspective honored, a tragedy recounted, a rescue remembered. Israeli performers fill several of the Jewish roles, a detail of quiet authenticity that stops well short of any casting campaign. Nothing here hectors. Nothing here preaches. Contemporary audiences looking for instruction will have to bring their own. The Żabińskis saved three hundred people and got a decent movie out of it, which is more than most get.