Chimpanzee (***1/2)

A coproduction of the Jane Goodall Institute, this should further burnish the reputation of Disneynature as a distributor of high-quality documentaries. (The two directors also worked on Earth, the first film distributed by Disneynature.) With stunning footage shot in jungles in Uganda and Ivory Coast, it follows a year or so in the life of a young chimp who is called Oscar, along with a few other members of the group he lives in. The “plot” mostly centers around food and the troupe’s efforts to find it, move it, open it (in the case of nuts), and defend it from a neighboring group. The characters consist of Oscar, his mother, the group leader, and a couple of other chimps who are specifically identified. There is drama, pathos, and light comedy, as with Oscar’s inept attempt to crack open a walnut. For this the chimps use large stones, a learned behavior that takes a long time to master.

Though it will appeal to adults, the documentary is clearly aimed at a family audience. The narration, read by Tim Allen*, is styled like it might accompany one of Disney’s traditional animated features. Oscar is referred to as “our little guy” and the like. The leaves one chimp munches on become a “side salad,” and so on. Still, it’s actually good storytelling that should be quite riveting even for kids used to animals that talk. Adults will be amazed at the painstaking effort that must have gone into capturing the apes as they hunt, prey, shiver in the rain, groom each other, and, of course, eat. They might also notice that not a word is said about mating; the chimps’ promiscuous ways would presumably be less family friendly than the pair bonding of, say, emperor penguins. The camera also cuts away from the most viscous scenes of predation.

Even with the anthropomorphic narration and child-friendly editing, the success the filmmakers have had recording the lives of these difficult-to-document animals makes this well worth watching for anyone with even a mild interest in the subject. Some beautiful time-lapse photography is  
a bonus.

*I’d never noticed before how much his voice sounds like that of Brad Pitt

IMDb link

viewed at Franklin Institute 12:00 N 5/27/12

Rise of the Planet of the Apes (***1/4)

Until close to the end of this movie, you might be wondering what a small sci-fi film about a scientist (James Franco) and his genetically modified chimp Caesar (Andy Serkis) has to do with the old film series in which an entire world of intelligent chimps rule over humans. But you’ll keep watching anyway.

Like so many films about scientists, this may be deplored by real one because even the relatively kind protagonist played by Franco comes off as a reckless fool. (His boss is also money-grubbing.) (Unlike Contagion, it also sticks with the usual depiction of scientists as lone geniuses rather than collaborators.) It’s also, essentially, the usual Garden of Eden-inspired morality play about scientists meddling in arenas where they don’t belong. And it’s an allegory about human cruelty that’s only slightly less heavy-handed than, say, Avatar, another film in which the humans are, allowing a few grudging exceptions, the villains. (This criticism is purely a dramatic one; the recent documentary Project Nim shows, in fascinating and sometimes heartbreaking fashion, that, for chimps in capitivity, humans really are, allowing a few grudging exceptions, villains.)

But the saving graces are two. First, it doesn’t confer upon apes some kind of spiritual purity. Instead, the film gives us, in Caesar, chimpanzee as warm and cuddly friend (like Spielberg’s E.T.), then (as Spielberg does with his robot in A.I.) yanks the curtain away from that sentimental view, then kind of balances it out, granting the non-human primates their, for lack of a better word, humanity. Second, unlike the the original Planet of the Apes (1968), or the misbegotten film of the same name from 2001, this is more in the vein of a modest thriller than some sort of epic. Somehow, when I don’t feel like the filmmaker is trying to make a grand statement, I am less inclined to quibble that a non-genentically modified orangutan is supposed to be able to have a complex discussion with Caesar simply because he too was once taught sign language. Or that the scientist’s apparently bright girlfriend can’t figure out in five years that Caesar might not be an ordinary ape.

This Rise, then, is a probably fantastic, but still entertaining extrapolation of the idea of what might happen if these creatures who are so similar to us, yet so much more powerful, got smarter. With the help of Serkis (repeating his motion-captured acting from Lord of the Rings), director Rupert Wyatt creates some arresting visuals to accompany the action-oriented second half of the film. The script from the team of Amanda Silver and Rick Jaffa (An Eye for an Eye, The Relic) apes (pun intended) E.T. and probably any number of other films, but the originality of having a non-human central character mostly compensates.

IMDB link

viewed 9/15/11 at UA Riverview and reviewed 9/16/11

Project Nim (***1/2)

I had heard the story of the chimpanzee Nim Chimsky. Born in 1973, he was the subject of an experiment whose ostensible purpose was to see if a chimp raised like a human child would develop basic language skills. As fascinating as that question is, the story of what happened to Nim as an individual is equally so, and certainly both stranger and, at times, disturbing. The decision to place Nim in a New York City apartment with a caretaker— a former student of the researcher living with half a dozen kids—who knew nothing about chimps and little about sign language is only the first of the odd events. She was, however, willing to treat him so like one of her own young children that she breast fed him. And yet, he would be taken from her.

There are several more stops on Nim’s odyssey, and while the jury is still out on how much language apes can acquire—a question explored more in Elizabeth Hess’s book than in this adaptation—it’s hard to come away from this movie with good feelings toward primate experimentation. Yet the tone director James Marsh takes is as even as that in his previous documentary, Man on Wire. He has the benefit of having nearly every person important to the story participating in his film, though most of the story is at a 30 year remove. This includes Herb Terrace, the researcher who oversaw Project Nim, as well as the humans who bonded with Nim. Since Nim was the subject of the scientific research, Marsh also has period footage of Nim, whose signing is helpfully translated on screen.

In the end, Nim shows himself to share many human qualities, but the film also shows that to be not entirely a flattering comparison.


IMDB link


viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 7/31/11