mike | 22 Jul 2011 | 749 Views | 2 Likes | 0 Dislikes

Review: Project Nim

Project Nim is an odd film. Sure, it's deftly-made (not surprising, as it's a product of the same hands that made the Oscar-winning and coincidentally very good Man on Wire in 2008), but it's marked by a couple of deep weirdnesses.

The first is a pleasure. What good docs do, and what Project Nim does, is tell an ostensibly true story. If it's the right story, and if it's told in the right way, told by people sensitive enough to understand the people involved in the story itself in such a way that they're willing to reveal hidden parts of themselves, then docs can reveal narrative arcs that are much weirder than we'd accept from a fiction film.

That's certainly the case with Project Nim, which follows the life of a chimp, Nim Chimpsky, who was the subject of an experiment in the '70s in New York, led by a professor at Columbia University, Herbert Terrace. In order to see if they could learn more about how human children acquire language, Terrace gave a young chimp to a family to raise. They were to treat the chimp, Nim, as if he were human - to dress him, feed him and speak to him the way they did their other children - to see what would happen to the primate's language skills.

That decision, it's revealed in the film, ignited a subtle but powerful firestorm of weird, fascinating interpersonal drama with Nim, the boy/chimp an otherworldly, unknowable meteor around which dozens of people hover, all seeing in him different and conflicting things.

The mother, who breast-fed him and cared for him as she would a human baby until it was determined that she wasn't doing enough to teach him, and from whom he was taken as abruptly as if he'd died. Different researchers, all with jealousies and resentment towards each other still visible on their faces in interviews shot today, the aloof project leader who held himself apart and disdained his own subject, the caretaker who would suffer at Nim's hands as he became too violent to control: all react to the extraordinary animal in completely surprising, often deeply dramatic ways.

The science in the film - whether or not Nim can "speak" - is secondary, largely, to the drama that his existence manufactured. It's in telling this moving and profoundly odd story that the film succeeds, when it succeeds, but it takes another weird turn in its third act and gives itself over to the story of Nim's adulthood, the period after his first docile 5 years, when he's shuttled around from farm to facility, abandoned by the people who raised him.

It's moving, sure, it's deeply saddening to see animals being treated poorly, but it's a misstep. The film's strength through its first two-thirds is that it tells a weird, fascinating human story by pretending to tell the story of a chimp. In focussing as the film does in its last 30 minutes on the admittedly sad period of Nim's solitary life it becomes lachrymose, maudlin. It feels like a naked appeal to sentiment, all of a sudden the film feels for the first time that it has a point, a message about something. It arrives out of nowhere, weird, inelegant and late-coming societal "heavy, man"-ness that seems really at odds with the rest of the film's exploratory tone, its lack of judgment. The first part is spectacular, the last part is OK. It's nit-picky, sure, as the film is more than worth seeing for doc fans, it's just a little weird.

Project Nim is playing at the Varsity in Toronto.

Did you like the article?

Dislike Thanks for rating!

1 Comment So Far. Have Your Say: SUBMIT

What is your name?
So that we know you're a real person: What colour is the sky?

Loading comments...