Academic arrogance vs. baby chimp

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This article was published 02/11/2011 (5430 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Hollywood has its share of horror stories involving the use of chimpanzees. As late as 1998, a 12-year-old actor was bitten on the face and permanently scarred by a chimp during the making of the Disney movie Mowgli’s Story.

That kid got off relatively lightly compared to the case of the woman who, in 2009, was blinded and had most of her face ripped off in a horrific chimp attack by an “animal actor” named Travis.

There is a formidable divide between chimp nature and human nature. But in 1973, that did not stop a Columbia University behavioral psychologist named Herbert Terrace from suggesting that a young mom adopt a baby chimp and raise it in a New York brownstone apartment as though it was a human baby with the ultimate intention of teaching the creature American sign language.

That experiment and its strange, twisty aftermath is the meat of Project Nim, a feature documentary on the life of the chimp by James Marsh (Man on a Wire). More importantly, it is a movie that addresses the human tendency to anthropomorphize animals, and the perils that presents to both species.

If not for the tragedy of Nim’s separation from his real mother in an Oklahoma primate facility (she was shot with a tranquilizer dart to enable the acquisition of her baby), the opening chapter of Nim’s life is the stuff of piquant social satire. Nim’s adoptive mother, a self-described “rich hippie” named Stephanie LeFarge, unilaterally decided to carry out the experiment at the behest of Terrace, a former lover, despite the fact she had recently remarried and was in the process of adapting to a marriage to a poet and raising a blended family of seven children (not counting the chimp).

LeFarge did indeed succeed in teaching Nim sign language for some basic words, but her teaching techniques were spontaneous and organic. She had no interest in compiling or recording data so just as Nim had lost one mother, he soon lost another. Terrace shipped the chimp off to a posh estate where she would be trained by another enthusiastic graduate student (and another one of Terrace’s lovers) named Laura-Ann Pettito.

Pettito could deliver the data, but she suffered her own painful realization of Nim’s animal nature — Nim slammed her head repeatedly into pavement. And so the experiment goes through more enthusiastic researchers before Terrace is resigned to believe Nim is not a primitive linguist but merely a creative beggar, a decision that ultimately consigns the chimp to the hell of medical research.

Fortunately, that is not the end of Nim’s story, but by this point, Marsh has made his point with a scathing portrayal of academic arrogance in which the movie’s villains indict themselves.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

MOVIE REVIEW

Project Nim

Directed by James Marsh

Cinematheque

PG

93 minutes

3 1/2 stars out of five

Other Voices

Selected excerpts from reviews of Project Nim.

Marsh … masterfully spins a harrowing tale of human arrogance that eventually gives way to cruelty bordering on the pathological.

— Ann Hornaday, Washington Post

Like the experiment itself, Project Nim morphs from something inspiring and often humorous to a pointed and disturbing portrait of arrogance run amok. Greed and glory end up overriding decency and altruism, and it’s heartbreaking to watch.

— Christy Lemire, Associated Press

Marsh knows this material is explosive, so he presents it simply and with little sentiment (against all odds, Nim is frequently very funny).

— Chris Hewitt, St. Paul Pioneer Press

Despite some heartbreak in the last half, this film brims with humanity and some priceless humour, too.

— David Edwards, Daily Mirror

Driven by James Marsh’s measured storytelling style, this ethically unsettling and emotionally compelling documentary is the equal of any cinematic epic.

— Erin Free, Filmink

Nim is as unforgettable as the treatment of him is unspeakable.

— Carrie Rickey, Philadelphia Inquirer

At times hilarious but ultimately heartbreaking, Project Nim is a great chronicle of the 1970s and all the nutty ideas that implies; academia in particular comes in for a hard reckoning.

— Bill Goodykoontz, Arizona Republic

It’s an astonishing story, and one of the year’s best documentaries.

— Norman Wilner, Now magazine

A documentary detailing man’s inhumanity to beast, Project Nim ends up going past that to ask a deeper, disturbing question: Just who is the man, and who is the beast?

— Stephen Whitty, Newark Star Ledger

Project Nim, a fascinating and in many ways tragic documentary, takes us back to one of the high-water marks of the apes-are-people-too era.

— Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly

— Compiled by Shane Minkin