Movie Thoughts: Surviving With Wolves (2007)

• Released: 21 November 2007
• Directed by: Véra Belmont
• Running time: 1 h 58 min
• Rating 3/5

Synopsis

After the Gestapo take away her parents, a Jewish girl called Misha travels east across Europe, looking for them. 

My Thoughts

So, I'll just get this out of the way first: the "biographical" book this movie was based on was revealed to be a hoax. Misha/Monique, the author, isn't even Jewish. It's all just a fabrication, possibly just to make some dough off of this sad yet unrealistic story. 

Seriously, I do have some suspension of disbelief, but the idea of a girl walking all the way from Belgium to Ukraine in the middle of World War II while facing harsh winters, yeah, it's a bit much. If she'd just toned down the amount of fantasticalness in her story she might have actually been able to pass it off for real. Or at least the chance would've been bigger. But, as it is, the book is a complete hoax, so this movie by extension as well (note, this adaptation was made before the hoax was revealed).  But ultimately this movie isn't the fault of the author of the book, it has a different director and everything. So I'll be judging it as if it were a fictional movie. 

There are a lot of good things about it, in that way. The acting is great (Misha's actress does an outstanding job for such a young age), the story is engaging if not a little hard to buy at times, and you just feel for this poor girl who wants her parents back more than anything. I also admire Misha's stubborn determination to refuse to give up on her parents, even if just "going east" is all she's doing in hopes of finding them. Eastern Europe is huge, how she'd ever expect to find them there is beyond me, but she does it anyways.

On her way she makes some friends and enemies, but she mostly stays all by herself and avoids human contact when possible. She lives by eating plants and stealing whatever she can get out of barns and houses. On her way, she ends up befriending a local wolf pack, particularly one of the wolves which she names "Mama Rita". The pack somewhat accept her, but their pups always take first place. In the end, her wolf friends are slaughtered by a hunter and Misha is forced to move on from her new found family. This was obviously sad, though, again, it requires some stretch of the imagination.

There's other things in this movie like this, too. Like, yeah, I don't buy the huge distance this girl can travel without dying of exposure or whatever else. But they also toned it down a bit. If I recall correctly she actually kills a soldier in the book, which is just ridiculous. How old is she? Ten? She does harm some people in the adaptation, but she never ends up taking any lives. 

In the end, she returns to Belgium (in a huge time skip without showing how she got back, mind you) and is taken in by a kind man she liked staying with at the start of the movie. Each day she waits for her parents to return, but they never did. That's what the movie fades out on. Very depressing.

So for my usual wolf portrayal rant: the wolves in this movie are played by American wolf species, which was just really distracting since this is WWII Europe the movie's taking place in. Mama Rita is an Arctic/Hudson Bay wolf (white coat) and Moonlight and Papa Ita are some other American type of wolf species, as they're both black. It's just really distracting to see these wolf colors in Europe, since we just don't have these over here. They couldn't even get agouti American wolves, to at least match the right color to Eurasian wolves. Kind of lame. I get that they wanted to parallel the wolves to the dog counterparts they were named after, but it really wasn't necessary. Also, I'm not too fond of how much interaction there was between wolf and kid. Maybe it'd just have been better if they'd gotten Tamaskans or wolfdogs for the job, since they have the right color and I'm less against using them for movies than real wolves in such cases. There's also some questionable scenes where lives wolves are set loose on life prey animals such as a boar and sheep, which were clearly in distress. Not that great a look. 

While this movie definitely had some strong points and I do genuinely like it, I just don't buy it enough, even as a fictional event for it to be real. Suspension of disbelief is really put to the test with using the wrong wolves, a girl walking such a huge distance twice without succumbing and all that jazz. And of course there's always the truth that the author lied about all of this for what is probably clout in the back of your mind while watching it. So I can't give this one too high a rating, morally, at least.