Are you ready for my first "F Rated" review? What? You don't know what the "F" movie rating is? Well, to be honest, neither did I, until literally a few short minutes ago. I was doing my usual post-viewing / pre-reviewing research before writing about my most recent theatrical experience and I came across the "F rating" – on the last day of Women's History Month, no less! First created in 2014 by Holly Tarquini, executive director of the Bath Film Festival, an F rating designates a movie which either has a female director, a female writer or a female in <more> a starring role in her own right. I came across this information after I noticed that the historical drama "The Zookeeper's Wife" PG-13, 2:04 not only stars a female Jessica Chastain in the title role, but was also written by a female Angela Workman AND directed by a female Niki Caro . But wait. Is there a rating for a movie like THAT? Yup! It's called the "Triple F"! Fortunately, before I settled for a lame proclamation like "Hail to the ladies" to start this paragraph, I learned about the F rating and the triple-F rating. But this F rating business isn't just observed at the Bath Film Festival and, as of today, by me. The mother of all Movie Fan websites, IMDb, has added the F, and triple-F ratings to their clickable search criteria! Only a little over 100 of IMDb's 4.1 million film and TV episode titles carries a triple-F rating, but with films like "The Piano", "Clueless", "Monster", "Brave", "Pitch Perfect 2", "The Edge of Seventeen" and "The Zookeeper's Wife" on that list, it's sure to grow.Jan Żabiński Johan Heldenbergh was the Director of the Warsaw Zoo in the summer of 1939, with his wife, Antonina Żabińska Chastain helping him care for the animals. The couple lived in a villa on the zoo grounds with their young son, Ryszard played by Tim Radford and then by Val Maloku . The family is happy with their lives and the zoo is thriving until September 1, 1939. The sudden although not entirely unexpected German invasion of Poland heavily damaged the zoo's structures and killed many of its animals. With winter approaching, Poland's new Nazi overlords have decided to close the zoo and exterminate the remaining animals. A professional acquaintance, Lutz Heck Daniel Brühl , the Director of the Berlin Zoo and the Third Reich's preeminent zoologist, offers to save some of the Warsaw Zoo's most prized species by transferring them to Berlin. With mixed emotions, Jan and Antonina agree. Months later, they approach Heck now an SS officer stationed in Warsaw and ask if they can turn their zoo into a pig farm. Seeing this move as a new food source for German soldiers and as an opportunity to conduct animal breeding experiments in an attempt to bring back extinct animal species, Heck agrees to keep the zoo open. He thinks of this solution as a "win-win", but Jan and Antonina have ulterior motives. Jan and Antonina have already started using their villa and the buildings and tunnels at the zoo to protect local Jews from the Nazis' increasing abuses. The pigs on their farm are fed garbage that comes from the Warsaw Ghetto, where the Nazis have consolidated the city's remaining Jewish population. When Jan drives his truck to the edge of the ghetto, he smuggles Jewish children out by hiding them under the garbage that he is collecting for his pigs. When additional methods are employed and with a little additional help from like-minded locals , adults and even entire families are taken to the zoo grounds, where Antonina and Ryszard do the lion's share of the work caring for and hiding their "guests". Although some of the Jews quickly pass through, others stay for long periods of time, requiring an elaborate system of measures designed to keep everyone safe. It's a system that becomes increasingly dangerous as time wears on, the number of Jews in hiding increases – and Heck comes around more and more, ostensibly for his breeding experiments, but also to flirt with Antonina. "The Zookeeper's Wife" is a fairly original and very engaging Holocaust story. The story arc is similar to the Best Picture and Best Director Oscar winner "Schindler's List", but still has its own unique elements. Like Steven Spielberg's 1993 masterpiece, here is an ordinary citizen using the workplace to hide Jews from the Nazis and having to cozy up to a Nazi officer, but this is a Holocaust movie with no concentration camp scenes and the ways in which the Jews are hidden and smuggled out has never been used in any Holocaust movie that I can remember. Adapted from the 2007 book of the same name by Diane Ackerman, this is a true story that's based on Żabiński's own unpublished wartime diary, which is one reason that this film is so impactful. The other reasons include Workman's smart script, Caro's sensitive and well-paced direction and the performances – especially from the Oscar-nominated Chastain "Hail to the ladies" . More than just giving Movie Fans a hard-to-believe-it's-true story, this film accomplishes some other important things too. It entertains, it educates, it impresses, it adds to cinema's growing list of triple-F rated movies and it brings us nearer to the time when it won't matter who made the movie – just that it's a really good one. "A-" <less> |