Little Dieter Needs to Fly

The banality of evil has never interested Werner Herzog as much as its perverse purity. Take the conquistador hero of Aguirre, the Wrath of God, for instance: treacherous, genocidal, incestuous, he's nonetheless apotheosized by his utter commitment to an image. Dieter Dengler, the subject of Herzog's astounding but uneven new documentary Little Dieter Needs To Fly, is not nearly as ruthless as Aguirre (how could he be, with a name like that?). But his monomania is nearly as terrifying. He too was enraptured by an image: the face of an American fighter pilot strafing his house during World War II. From that point on, the nine-year-old Dieter needed to fly. The obsession takes him (after a Dickensian upbringing in Germany) to the US, where he becomes a Navy pilot who's shot down in 1967 over Laos a couple of hours into his first mission. Captured by the enemy, he's tortured, escapes, and, skeletal and hallucinating, is rescued.

It's hard to go wrong with a story like this, and Herzog sticks to the basics, though with his typically near-hysterical spin. A motor-mouthed, oddly light-hearted Dengler relates the events in voiceover, which Herzog illustrates with historical footage and a queasy on-location re-enactment of Dengler's ordeal at the hands of his captors. Sometimes Herzog adds his own commentary, with occasional clunky effect ("His world was a dreamscape of the surreal . . . then he saw his first sausage in a display window"). From the opening quote from Revelation onward, though, you know Herzog sees in Dieter's tale more than just an anecdote: Dieter may need to fly, but Herzog needs to film. At the Harvard Film Archive.

-- Peter Keough