Plan for an Ape

Dearie me, you can wait what seems like an eternity for a movie about the troubled life of a chimpanzee raised in a human home and taught sign language as part of a scientific experiment, and then two come along on the same weekend. What are the chances of that happening?

Well, when you have fairly shrewd marketing people on the case, they’re actually pretty good, as James Marsh’s Project Nim certainly seems to be benefitting from riding in the slipstream of an, ahem, Certain Other Movie with which it shares very striking – if ultimately superficial – similarities.

The most obvious difference between Project Nim and the Other Movie is that Project Nim is a documentary, but one which definitely enters stranger-than-fiction territory. The Nim of the title is a chimpanzee, taken from his mother in early infancy to be brought up around humans as part of an experiment to test the language-acquisition capacity of higher primates. As Nim grows and the project develops, he is moved from place to place and forms relationships with a number of different teachers and handlers (many of whom are interviewed for the film – following his death in 2000, Nim himself was unavailable to participate). When the project concludes (mainly due to Nim’s increasing size and aggressiveness) Nim finds himself sent to a primate shelter and conditions far different to the ones he is used to.

Well, I don’t want to spoil the ending for anyone, but suffice to say that the Statue of Liberty remains intact and the dominion of man is unshaken. Nevertheless, this is an engrossing and rather moving film deeply concerned with what it means to blur the lines between human and animal (do great apes count as animals? Even here we raise deep questions).

The focus of the Nim project itself and its findings are not really explored in the movie, which was a slight disappointment to me (teaching a language is my job), but I suppose a disquisition on the nature of syntax and Nim’s inability to engage properly with it would doubtless have been a bit dry for what is, after all, a movie. (For what it’s worth, given that a typical pronouncement from Nim was ‘Tickle me Nim play’, suggestions he never quite mastered grammar seem well-founded.) But the movie is unstinting in its implicit criticism throughout of the procedure.

There’s something odd about the idea that raising an animal as a human being somehow constitutes cruelty – we do the same to our own children, after all – but that’s what the film returns to time after time. And for all their protestations otherwise, all the project participants seem unable to resist treating Nim as an actual person. ‘As Nim grew older he started to behave like a chimp,’ reveals the project leader, which would probably be more surprising if he wasn’t actually a chimp to begin with. It’s clear that this didn’t really benefit Nim at all (or indeed those associated with him: most of the trainers reel off lists of scars they received when Nim got tetchy and bit them).

One of the things that this movie reveals en passant is the deeply eccentric personalities of some of the people involved in scientific research in this period. Nim seems relatively well-adjusted compared to some of them. The project leader, in addition to being surprised to discover his test chimp is actually behaving like a chimp, appears to have slept with practically every other person involved (not Nim himself, I hasten to add) and to not consider this in any way peculiar. Most of Nim’s handlers were, basically, hippies, and this inevitably must have impacted on the ape. ‘I breastfed him for the first few months,’ reveals his initial foster-mother, casually. Later on other handlers introduced Nim to the joys of alcohol and dope – one of them fondly recalls that hanging out with Nim was the best time in his life, with the exception of going to see the Grateful Dead in concert. ‘What can I say, it was the Seventies!’ another interviewee exclaims by way of explanation.

Parts of this film are blackly comic and parts of it are quite harrowing, mostly in the latter stages of Nim’s life. Implicit again here is the fact that while the attempt to teach Nim human faculties may have been misconceived, it’s only this which saved him from a potentially much worse fate – and if Nim is fundamentally no different from any other chimp, why should he alone receive special treatment?

The film raises these kinds of questions but leaves it to the audience to find their own answers to them. It’s a well put-together picture without too many intrusive stylistic quirks, and without the forced surrealism that occasionally made Marsh’s last movie, Man on Wire, slightly irritating in places. The scheduling of its release has probably won it a little more attention than it would otherwise have received, but it’s still an intelligent and moving film that tells a fascinating story with great skill and compassion.