A much more engaging film about three Americans abroad is Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn. This is the story of pilot Dieter Dengler, who is shot down over Laos in the early days of the Vietnam war. Unlike Wes Anderson's heroes, the guys in Rescue Dawn care about something—getting home. And since this is so apparently impossible and so desperately wanted, they've evolved a psychological web to deal with their condition, which we watch develop over two dynamic hours.
In other words, Herzog is interested in what it is to need and to try for something.

Check out the encounter between Dengler and the North Vietnamese officer who, in a nice, tropical, breezy, wooden room, with no weapons at hand, asks Dengler to sign a confession and denounce the US government. There is an encounter here: the two men size each other up, they make decisions about each other, about what to do. How much better this than Anderson's matchups between the hijinxing brothers and the numb, otherly Indians.

Besides the human dynamics, what I like about Herzog is he's not afraid to highlight the mechanism of the story. In Fitzcarraldo, he takes the boat over the mountain. Here, he shows us the inside of the handcuffs, the space underneath the jailhouse, the prisoners' technique for tracking their captors, and "stack it up for me," the game of remembering home. Much moviemaking takes movie magic as its support—fair enough, if it tells a good story. But Herzog's films are so often compelling because he insists on showing us how the thing works: the gizmos for hoisting that boat over the hill, or (my favorite) the handcuffs, in this film. There's a pleasure in this, like appreciating your buddy's jalopy fixit job, or the fine tooling on an analog watch: the marvel of a clever thing accomplished. I don't mean the filmmaking workmanship, but something else: in this case, Dengler's feats, both skillful and charismatic, not to mention fundamentally willful and hopeful—to escape and survive in the jungle.