Film: Our Primates, Ourselves
Movies that explore man’s connection with his fellow primates are not exactly known for their gravity. Images of Clint Eastwood and Tony Danza horsing around with orangutans are probably playing in your head right now (don’t try to deny it). When Hollywood deems it worthy to tackle the subject with a straight face, the results (Project X, Gorillas in the Mist) reduce simians to secondary figures in stories revolving around their Homo sapiens counterparts.
This weekend, it’s all about the monkeys at the movies. An ape invasion everywhere you look. And this time, our genetic cousins are placed up front and center.
The first word that comes to mind after watching Project Nim, the phenomenal new documentary from Oscar-winning director James Marsh, is honesty. This wrenching, deeply moving portrait of a science experiment’s incalculable toll on its test subject sets itself apart for the unusual candor in its interview footage. Coming off worst of all is former Columbia University behavioral psychologist Herbert Terrace, who decided in the early seventies to challenge linguist Noam Chomsky’s thesis that only humans are capable of using language to form full sentences.
Enter Nim Chimpsky, a cuddly chimpanzee baby from an Oklahoma primate research facility. So what if they had to snatch the wide-eyed furball from his mother’s arms two weeks after birth? Nim spent his early years at the Upper West Side home of Stephanie LaFarge, who breastfed and raised him as part of a very dysfunctional family unit. Her husband, Wer a “rich hippie” who wrote poetry, didn’t care for the chimp, and, as we discover from priceless home video footage and stills, the dislike was mutual. LaFarge admits that she wasn’t being rigorous from a scientific perspective, and after one year, Nim was moved to an university-owned upstate New York property, a more appropriate environment for Terrace and his assistants to conduct their research, which also included teaching their subject to communicate in American Sign Language.
Marsh illustrates how Nim is able to use ASL to, say, ask for food or to request playtime, by superimposing the words he used on the screen in a way that recalls the work of Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line), but the director is ultimately more interested in depicting Nim’s emotional journey. Talking-head footage and reenactments are at the bottom of my list of preferred nonfiction storytelling tools, but like he did in his previous film, the enthralling tightrope-artist profile Man on Wire, Marsh uses both elements seamlessly in Project Nim. The recreation of, for instance, a gasp-inducing incident in which Nim bit a researcher in the cheek, is rendered with such immediacy that it feels like you witnessed it firsthand. To the filmmaker’s credit, he refuses to sugarcoat Nim’s animal nature, or to let any of his human caretakers off the hook.
When the experiment fails to yield the findings Terrace was hoping for, he abruptly ended the project and returned Nim to the facility where he was born. That marks the beginning of a downward spiral in which the chimp is carted off from place to place, each more dire than the last. It’s a harrowing ordeal that unfolds with the potency and storytelling thrust of a Charles Dickens novel. Marsh poses some thorny questions about the link between us and those creatures who share almost all of our DNA, and his clear-eyed, unsentimental approach, occasionally marred by Winter’s Bone composer Dickon Hinchliffe’s overdetermined music score, only increases our empathy for its subject, who becomes the furthest thing from a lab animal than you can imagine. My biased, unscientific conclusion: Project Nim is one of the best films of the year.
I was prepared to use Marsh’s achievement as a blunt instrument to hammer Twentieth Century Fox’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes, but what’s striking about this solid, surprisingly layered studio reboot is the filmmakers’ insistence in balancing expertly crafted, effects-driven action sequences with some deliberately paced character development, a welcome rarity in such a high-profile summer release. This isn’t the story of how scientist Will Rodman (the ever-dependable James Franco) creates a drug that makes chimps smarter. And it’s not the tale of how Steven his greedy, no-nonsense boss (David Oyelowo), misuses his top researcher’s discovery in an attempt to dominate the pharmaceutical market. Apes turns out to be just as much of a nuanced character study as Nim.
Our simian protagonist is Caesar, a marvel of motion capture technology “performed” by Gollum himself, Andy Serkis. (The Lord of the Rings connection doesn’t end there: Apes was shot by Andrew Lesnie, that trilogy’s cinematographer.) After Steven orders him to shut down the development of ALZ-112, a virus with the potential to cure brain-related illnesses, Will stows away Caesar, the newborn offspring of his first test subject, and raises him in his San Francisco home with his Alzheimer’s-afflicted father (John Lithgow). The latter appears to be completely cured after Will injects him with the drug, and Caesar, whose mother passed the enhanced cognitive abilities to him, displays a remarkable ability to interact with his surrogate family.
Years pass, and the older Caesar looks even more realistic than his infant-age incarnation. (Franco, however, doesn’t seem to age a day throughout the film’s decade-long span.) The CGI work is exceptional, though some of the chimps’ movements, particularly when they’re swinging, recall the cartoonish effects in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies. Gollum remains the gold standard for virtual characters onscreen, but director Rupert Wyatt (The Escapist) and the husband-and-wife screenwriting team of Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver imbue Caesar with an ambiguity and moral resolve that elevates the film above Tim Burton’s erratic 2001 remake of the first Apes. They also refuse to shy away from the apocalyptic implications of a potential simian-led hostile takeover.
Rise of the Planet of the Apes feels very much like the initial chapter of a trilogy. The opening salvo of a global catastrophe that threatens humankind, in particular, feels like an underdeveloped homage to Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys. But the film’s climax, which takes place (naturally) on the Golden Gate Bridge, as well as the ending, which shows two characters from different species facing each other like equals, left me intrigued to find out what happens next.
Apes runs amok in wide release starting Friday. Project Nim begins the final week of its 14-day engagement at the Coral Gables Art Cinema (gablescinema.com).
