Project Nim
Time Out New York Project: Issue #820, July 7-13, 2011 (Online Only)
★★★☆☆
Dir. James Marsh. 2011. N/R. 93mins. Documentary.
It’s simian cautionary tale week in Gotham. After taking in Film Forum’s re-release of the sci-fi classic Planet of the Apes, you might make room for James Marsh’s uneven, yet revealing documentary about Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee at the center of a controversial 1970s research project. The film opens with Marsh garishly recreating the fateful moment when Nim, barely out of the womb, is ripped from his mother’s arms and given to behavioral psychologist Herbert Terrace. It’s an off-puttingly maudlin and manipulative scene (slo-mo tranquilizer dart — oh no!), and there are a number of similarly flashy indulgences throughout. When one of the interviewees recalls a rampaging Nim throwing a chair through a window, Marsh cuts to a slickly off-kilter shot of…a chair going through a window.
The good news is that the film’s stylistic excesses don’t negate the many fascinating aspects of Nim’s story. Terrace and his team hoped to prove that a chimpanzee raised by humans could learn to communicate via sign language. Marsh makes liberal use of the project’s 16mm and video records to show how Nim quickly progressed from simple words to basic commands, though he also reveals, quite critically, how the scientists were hardly dispassionate in their research. (A particularly eyebrow-raising moment: one of the female participants casually admits to breastfeeding the baby chimp for several months.) After the fact-finding ended, Nim was shuttled to a Mengele-like research facility and finally to an abused animals’ haven. Project Nim raises many troublingly acute questions about the human inclination to anthropomorphize the animal kingdom, which complicates, though still doesn’t excuse, Marsh’s own tendency to do just that. The film’s ersatz happy ending is the biggest blunder; it may have you longing for an ape revolution, just to counter the cloying sentimentality.—Keith Uhlich