Starring Jessica Chastain. Rated 14A

A zoo is a fitting place to act out the drama of man’s inhumanity to man—and beast, of course. The Zookeeper’s Wife, adapted from Diane Ackerman’s nonfiction book of the same name, does a fairly solid job of getting that notion across. Here, solid is also a word encapsulating handsome, stiff, and stolid, with this ambitious movie coming off as more museum piece than living history.

Things begin with Jessica Chastain—also one of the film’s executive producers—as Antonina Żabińska, beginning her daily rounds at the Warsaw Zoo. As the empathic partner to zoologist Jan Żabiński (Flemish actor Johan Heldenbergh), she nuzzles lion cubs that sleep with their young son, throws apples to devoted elephants, and bicycles through the grounds with a small camel in tow.

You don’t even need to be told that it’s August of 1939 to know that any idyll this beautiful can’t last. Soon enough, the Germans invade and, in a disturbing sequence that presages all to come, this sanctuary is devastated in a series of attacks. (Definitely not the sort of thing Matt Damon signed on for in We Bought a Zoo.)

Also on the scene is Lutz Heck, Berlin’s head zoologist and, inevitably, a believer in fake eugenics. War Bride scribe Angela Workman inserts a quasi-romance between Antonina and Heck—in real life a fusty middle-ager who resembled Hitler more than he did Rush’s dashing Daniel Brühl. This helps to raise the personal stakes for the Żabińskis, but seems a trivial side issue when they begin spiriting Jews out of the teeming Warsaw Ghetto and hiding them in their ironically cage-lined cellar.

The bigger problem is that director Niki Caro, a New Zealander who started out promisingly with 2002’s Whale Rider, stages the whole, exposition-laden tale with the kind of awkward solemnity you frequently get with multinational costume dramas, especially when they are entirely in English. It doesn’t help that Chastain, almost too radiant for the role, is stuck with a thick Russo-Polish accent, and with a leading man heavy on gravitas (festgoers may know him from Belgium’s The Broken Circle Breakdown) and light on screen appeal.

By packaging its horrors in such customary form, the two-hour-plus movie also risks fetishizing familiar history at the expense of horrors unfolding today.