Still, Chastain does great work despite the accent (on which she toiled with dialogue coach Joan Washington), capturing the spirit of a humanist veterinarian from the opening scene. This failing is a real shame, considering such feats of heroism tend to earn Oscars for those involved, and it’s high time for Chastain - coupled with the fact that “The Zookeeper’s Wife” is such a great story to begin with, but suffers under the weight of this tongue-tying distraction. This tendency to reenact world history in English is a common enough convention, and yet, in this case, it’s enough to derail the earnest efforts of everyone involved, since so much of the work they spend “acting” seems dedicated to navigating his imaginary stew of languages, with the result that everyone but Brühl sounds like a poorly educated Polish immigrant, rather than the fiercely intelligent resistance fighters that they were, while the Nazi character comes off sounding positively refined. Speaking of accents, that’s precisely where director Niki Caro’s “The Zookeeper’s Wife” goes awry, as Jessica Chastain wrestles to sound as Polish as possible while others in the ensemble - from German-born Daniel Brühl, whose English is impeccable, to foreign-sounding Flemish actor Johan Heldenbergh as Antonina’s Fuhrer-defying husband Jan - operate using a hodgepodge of different Euro inflections, all of them speaking a language that none of the characters actually did. Of all the places to protect Jewish refugees, the bombed-out bestiary made for a uniquely cinematic hideaway while yielding just the sort of triumph-of-the-will story most audiences prefer to hear when the Holocaust is mentioned: one where both human and animal lives are spared, accentuating happy endings amid so much devastation. When it came to saving lives during World War II, Oskar Schindler had his factory, Leopold Socha had the Lwów sewers, and Jan and Antonina Żabiński had the Warsaw Zoo, transforming abandoned cages into the unlikeliest of sanctuaries.