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The director chooses silences and understatement, since this inherently amazing story doesn’t need dressing up. But as the film moves on, Caro keeps the action and emotion grounded and real throughout. In the film’s romanticized beginning, our heroine Antonina Zabinski (Jessica Chastain, affecting an accent that you’ll probably get used to) does seem to live the most picture-perfect life ever - frolicking with the free-roaming zoo animals, sipping tea on her balcony and gazing lovingly at her doting husband and son. Jessica Chastain plays Antonina Zabinski, the title character. For WWII films, audiences have learned to be suspicious of those that look too pretty - which, in the case of “The Zookeeper’s Wife,” might make them think it will have a suffocating sentimentality, emotional blackmail and too-neat resolution. This extraordinary true story is dramatized in director Niki Caro’s “The Zookeeper’s Wife,” based on the nonfiction book by the naturalist-writer Diane Ackerman.Ĭaro, who directed “Whale Rider” and “McFarland, USA,” imbues the production with a glossy sheen that, in the trailers and advertisements, might make the film look slight. In German-occupied Poland during the darkest days of World War II, a zookeeper and his wife managed to save the lives of hundreds of Jewish people, many of them detained earlier in the Warsaw Ghetto, by providing shelter and refuge for them on the zoo grounds. ‘Zookeeper’s Wife,’ starring Jessica Chastain, tells a riveting fact-based WWII story