In ‘The Zookeeper’s Wife,’ the real animals are in uniform

Johan Heldenbergh (gesturing) costars in “The Zookeeper’s Wife.”Anne Marie Fox/Focus Features

“Like a Valkyrie at rest” is how writer Diane Ackerman described Antonina Zabinski, the subject of her 2007 book, “The Zookeeper’s Wife.” By which measure the gauzy Amazonian presence of Jessica Chastain in the new movie version has to count as typecasting. (If it were “a Valkyrie at attention,” they’d go with Angelina Jolie.)

Zabinski and her husband, Jan, ran the Warsaw Zoo before, during, and after World War II. In the course of the Nazi occupation, from 1939 to 1945, the couple spirited more than 300 Jews out of the nearby Warsaw Ghetto to safety in Poland and beyond, using the zoo’s cages, cellars, and outbuildings as hiding places and transfer points. When Jan (played by the sturdy Belgian actor Johan Heldenbergh) lays out his plan to his wife, Antonina responds brightly, “A human zoo . . .”

And there you have the problem with “The Zookeeper’s Wife”: Dialogue and plotting that keep this inspirational, mostly true story earthbound by hitting every note with a hammer. Angela Workman is credited with the, um, workmanlike screenplay, and it feels as if she has written every last line in yellow highlighter. Early on, after the Nazis have chased off or shot all the exotic beasts, the couple turns their zoo into a pig farm; they feed the animals with garbage brought from the ghetto in trucks that hide fleeing refugees. In case we haven’t noticed, one of the characters announces, “What an irony: a trayfe (non-kosher) farm fed by Jewish garbage.” At times, the movie feels like its own reading guide.

But there are worthy things here as well. The direction by Niki Caro lacks the mystical touch she brought to 2002’s “Whale Rider,” another story of the bonds between humans and the animal kingdom, but it focuses more squarely than do most WWII films on the prices that women pay in wartime. As the basements of the Warsaw Zoo fill up with mothers and children, a traumatized rape victim (Shira Haas), and other victims of the Reich’s brutality, they come to represent, along with Antonina, the flame of civilization burning through the night.

The star plays the title role as a beleaguered saint, with the slight dullness that implies. If Chastain conveys the empathy her character feels for the war’s victims and the mind-meld she shares with the various four-legged beasts in her care, she fails to give Antonina the idiosyncrasies that would bring her into human-size focus. The movie provides a snooty Nazi zoologist named Lutz Heck (Daniel Bruhl of “Rush”) to paw at Antonina and use her oxen for an experiment in genetically re-creating the extinct Auroch. “I vant to rescue the best of your breeds,” he tells the Zabinskis with heavy-breathing double meaning.

There was a real Lutz Heck, and he did have bizarre theories about animal master races, but it’s doubtful he threatened the historical Antonina like a mustache-twirling villain out of a vintage melodrama. In playing up these scenes, “The Zookeeper’s Wife” neglects the zookeeper himself. Some of the most suspenseful sequences involve Jan’s subterfuges in getting Jews out of the Ghetto to a network of Polish Samaritans and resistance fighters. The film ultimately sidelines the character in a jealous funk and then spirits him away entirely; by then, the editing has become choppy enough that in one scene Antonina is suddenly nine months pregnant with no sense of when that might have happened.

It’s all well-intentioned and plushly mounted and fundamentally decent, and the history lesson may send moviegoers back to Ackerman’s book. But despite the title, “The Zookeeper’s Wife” is probably not for more soft-hearted animal lovers, since the depredations of war are visited harshly on all creatures great and small. Which is to say that if you want to know the best way to bury a bison, here’s your movie.

★ ★ ½
THE ZOOKEEPER’S WIFE

Directed by Niki Caro. Written by Angela Workman, based on the book by Diane Ackerman. Starring Jessica Chastain, Johan Heldenbergh, Daniel Bruhl. At Boston Common, Fenway, West Newton, suburbs. 124 minutes. PG-13 (thematic elements, disturbing images, violence, brief sexuality, nudity, and smoking).