For the
sake of not having to write the same intro a million
different ways throughout the rest of time, just know that
this column avoids the overly long and sometimes dull
process of full film reviews and instead opts to break
things down based on what I thought going in, what happened
while I was there and what I learned at the end of it all.
Thanks for reading!
The
Breakdown - Project Nim
The Impression:
James Marsh is a fine director and if he wants to make a
film about a animal behavior, science gone absolutely crazy,
and a monkey raised to be a human, you can be assured that
I’ll be standing in line with a ticket in hand opening
night.
The Reality:
This film has a woman breast-feeding a chimp in it. No, no
you never see a chimp actually placing it’s mouth on a
woman’s nipple, but it is alluded to, quite frankly, that a
woman breast feeds a chimp, Nim of the film’s title. And
that’s the sort of batshit world this documentary exists in.
Nim was a baby chimpanzee that Professor Herbert Terrace (a
true villain by all accounts) decided that he would raise
from birth to see if he could teach the chimp to speak and
live as a human. In my opinion, this is a terrible idea, and
director James Marsh presents Herbert Terrace as an awful
man with no sort of scientific morality. He drags the chimp
from foster family to foster family destroying lives before
finally giving up on the whole idea and basically selling
the chimp in to monkey slavery. It’s a shocking story for a
number of reasons, but Terrance’s faulty use of scientific
power is the most egregious aspect represented. Marsh spends
a good portion of his film interviewing Nim’s various
caretakers and the conversations create the idea that we as
human’s place our own troubles on the animals that come in
to our lives. Nim, a standard chimpanzee, is often cited as
the cause of marital difficulties, as a mind-reader, as a
vengeful but sparing sociopath. Marsh, thankfully, leaves
his more obvious beliefs out of the film, but his editing
seems to say that as much as we can teach a monkey to do, at
the end of the day, he’s still a monkey. Project Nim
is a great, strange little documentary crafted in the
footsteps of Errol Morris, and it continues the notion that
Marsh is certainly a filmmaker to keep an eye on.
The Lesson:
Leave monkeys in their monkey kingdoms where they can have
sex with other monkeys all days and throw poop at tourists.
- Noah Sanders
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