UP WITH TURKEYS! “Free Birds” and Animal Rights

“The only message in it is all the holidays are about pressing pause in your life and getting together with the people that you love and appreciating them.”

–Jimmy Hayward, writer-director of Free Birds

by Jennifer Epps

This review was originally published Nov. 29, 2013 on the Political Film Blog.


It may be true that Jimmy Hayward had no political or social agenda when he co-wrote the animated adventure-comedy Free Birds, a time travel romp which sends a pair of turkeys back to 1621 to interfere with the pilgrims’ first Thanksgiving feast and try to “take turkeys off the menu.” Filmmakers frequently disavow any ulterior motive when they make films that could be controversial, but maybe he really thought it was just a good story. Frankly, his intentions are his own business. We vegetarians don’t get much entertainment of our own, and a Thanksgiving fantasy in which a turkey pardoned by the President and a commando from the Turkey Freedom Front go on a mission “not just to save 10 turkeys or 100 turkeys, but all turkeys for all time” is pretty mind-blowing. Of course we’re likely to be reminded almost as soon as we leave the cinema that the slaughter continues, but you can’t change the future if you can’t imagine how different it could be. Free Birds works the way The Yes Men’s fantasy newspaper headlines did in their prank New York Times issues,  or the way John Lennon’s lyrics in “Imagine” do. They affirm that you can, in fact, imagine a Thanksgiving tradition in which the pilgrims ate boxed pizza. It’s easy if you try.

The movie doesn’t advocate a totally plant-based diet, so I’m afraid vegans might not be fully satisfied. And in one shot a pizza even has anchovies! But Rome wasn’t built in a day, and the stacks of pizzas delivered via time machine do seem to be just cheese pizzas with tomato sauce — no meat is in evidence. Moreover, the fact that Woody Harrelson’s voice is in this movie is a significant part of its delights. Not only does his deft vocal performance have beautiful comic timing as a self-important, barrel-chested turkey warrior for the cause, but the presence of this premier vegan in a growing list of celebrity herbivores (which includes not only Bill Clinton but now Al Gore), speaks to the positive spirit of the film. To have Harrelson playing Jake, the most motivated, most activist turkey of them all, is a clever in-joke.

Like Chicken Run, irrepressible Aardman Animations’ take on another species of fowl who would rather live than be eaten, the plight of the characters in Free Birds is grim, but much less in a PETA spy-cam kind of way than in a boisterous, storybook adventure way. The Thanksgiving tradition may loom over the eponymous turkeys, but the specific villain is a scowling, Cockney military officer determined to hunt down the wild turkeys in the woods near the Puritans’ settlement, and most of the movie is about the wild birds’ attempts to stay safe in a vast underground colony while also carrying out guerrilla ambushes.



There’s just enough context to provoke thought – should the viewer so choose. The movie launches off with a powerful contrast between the Norman Rockwell glow that Thanksgiving brings to humans feasting on a succulent golden-brown bird and the horror felt in the breast of a member of that species – realizing for the first time the truth behind his kind’s coexistence with humans. The president’s public pardoning of one turkey also shows some of the hypocritical tension that lurks behind our eating habits: he makes a speech (voiced by Hayward himself) as he proudly rescues the lone turkey, excoriating the “terrible, but delicious” fate this one fortunate fowl has escaped.

Amusingly, when the turkey hero Reggie (Owen Wilson) warns his peers on the farm of the vast plot against them, none of them will believe him. They’re blissfully oblivious of the danger  – and that’s because, Reggie’s voice-over tells us, turkeys are stupid. I like the implicit argument (which let me repeat is completely implicit) that even an unintelligent life form might want and deserve better than becoming our dinner. (A hierarchical Chain of Being is usually part of carnivores’ defenses of meat eating, even though it is a very vulnerable argument.) The complacency of the unsuspecting turkeys works as social satire as well: when the flock finally realizes that the intellectual Reggie, who they’ve been ostracizing, is right about why the farmer’s been fattening them up, they turn against him even more: because “he’s anti-corn.”

However, when Reggie ends up, through convoluted steps (and a time machine that’s an experiment of the U.S. military!), back in 1621, the wild turkeys he meets turn out to be completely different. They’re self-sufficient, alert, and much more pro-active; it’s apparently the domestication and dependency that dumbed the turkeys down. In case we might think this is only true for farm animals, there are also scenes of Reggie enjoying life as a remote-flipping, pizza-munching, couch potato addicted to Telenovelas. And when he’s in that mode, he doesn’t think as clearly as the more active turkeys. Sounds familiar.

The 17^th century wild American turkeys have been forced further and further back off their land by the white Europeans – and since this mimics what happened to the Native Americans, it’s fitting that many of these turkeys paint their faces with war paint like in some indigeneous tribes. The head of the wild flock is also presented very much like an Indian chief, and finds himself a victim of a similar march of progress. In the climax, the turkeys face off against the Europeans on the battlefield: the turkeys have only wooden spears and flaming pumpkins and are vastly outmatched by the settlers’ arsenal. It’s too bad that when a couple of real Native Americans do finally show up, there isn’t more thought given to their characters.

But for those who care about animal rights, it should be very significant that the movie has a scene set in a factory farm. “I didn’t grow up on a nice free-range farm,” Jake tells Reggie, jealous of the pastoral life the more passive turkey has led. Instead, Jake explains in a flashback to a severe, black, industrial, prison-like CAFO, he grew up “in a cold factory.” The spirits of all these turkeys imprisoned in a sunless grey wasteland are clearly broken. Rows upon rows of glum turkeys in shadowy metal cages set their hopes on Jake breaking out and starting a new, freer flock, but he is no match for the humans in lab coats and their oppressive technology. And this original trauma works even better as political commentary because it is woven into the core of Jake’s character development – and into the time travel plot.

Now, factory farms are actually much worse than how they are depicted in the movie – since in real life factory farmed fowl are crowded into these cages and often unable to turn around or stretch – but the fact that an escapist piece of mainstream entertainment intended for family viewing is painting one as dungeon-like is damn amazing, and credit should be given where due.



The main flaw of the picture, like that of so many movies but particularly animated ones, is that the ratio of male characters to female characters is about 90 to 1. These movies seem to think they’re feminist because they have a gutsy heroine – the chief’s daughter, voiced very well by Amy Poehler, has plenty of dialogue and is smart, resourceful, confident, a good leader, and all the rest of the attributes common these days among princessly heroines – but she’s the only female character in an entire turkey civilization who speaks more than a single sentence. In this respect the turkeys echo the humans in the settlement, where only the males are individualized. As per usual, the male characters cover a wide range of types – old, young, plump, wiry, brave, cowardly, brilliant, foolish, and so on – just as people do in real life. But the females are the Other, and since they are seen from the perspective of the male protagonists, they can only be  Love Interests. (This was particularly egregious in Barnyard, a 2006 animated feature about a herd of male cows.) In Free Birds, even when a nursery of turkey chicks becomes part of the narrative, there seem to be no significant female turkeys anywhere in sight besides Poehler. The boy turkeys get to hog not only the allegedly male functions of driving the plot, having adventures, and solving problems, but here they even try on the traditional female functions of parenting the chicks!

Hayward is co-writer, director, and also voice actor for a handful of roles in the picture – in other words, he is pulling a Brad Bird. Unfortunately, he hasn’t delivered a finished product that sparkles as much as it seems to want to do. The references cater more to the adults in the audience than to the kids, and the schtick gets in the way of the story sometimes because it goes on so long and is so tangential. Also, a fair number of the one-liners and gags don’t quite land, partly because the rhythm, as is so often the case in animated features, is relentlessly hyperactive.  Now, if it had been one of the inventive Aardman Animations films it probably would have gotten more and more richly entangled at the climax – as it is, there’s a build and build and then a  very quick and sudden resolution.  But all in all, the story works. The premise is not only an animal liberationist’s dream, it’s also clever and spirited.

Vegetarians and animal rights activists ought to embrace this movie. Society cannot be changed just by sharing polemical documentaries with your circle (as terrific as Forks Over Knives and Harrelson’s own, Go Further, are).  Some of the work of reform has to come about through sheer silliness. Like when the turkeys in Free Birds make imaginary binoculars with their feathered fingers, yet are convinced they really do see better with them. Or like the layers of jokey time travel loops which complicate the climax. Or like when Jake goes into a reverie about The Great Turkey in the sky, and each time, he stops and stares into space. Even though I had to look up what a Turducken was, it’s worth waiting for the end of the credits to hear Jake’s horrified outrage about it.

Blackfish: Putting the 'Killer' Back in 'Killer Whale'

by Jennifer Epps

Originally posted on Political Film Blog on August 22, 2013.

 

The non-fiction feature Blackfish currently in theaters is in many ways a sterling example of summer counter-programming: a success at the Sundance Film Festival this past winter, it now provides a quiet voice of seriousness, an exposé on a serious subject, amidst the usual superheroes and monsters at the multiplex in the hot weather months. It begins, however, rather like a famous summer monster movie, with the mystery of a young woman’s gruesome, watery death, and like that blockbuster, proceeds to pile on clues of just how she died and how many others like her there might actually be. The template I’m referring to is the 1975 thriller Jaws, which together with Star Wars, launched the gargantuan juggernaut of costly, loud, franchise-heavy action pix which dominate the out-of-school season -- so there is a poetic irony in a documentary cousin emerging from the depths to challenge that paradigm. The irony pales in comparison to the tragedy, however;  the genesis  for the making of Blackfish was an actual death, that of 20-something Dawn Brancheau, an accomplished swimmer and trainer at SeaWorld Orlando, who was mauled and dismembered in 2010.

The culprit in Blackfish is not a wild rogue shark but a tame orca or ‘killer whale’, a large male named Tilikum who Dawn knew very well. While much of the file footage in the documentary shows positive, intimate interactions between humans and these giant marine mammals, there is still a very ominous slow build of suspense and horror. Some of the segments feel (unintentionally, perhaps) like the July 4th beach scene in Spielberg’s movie -- a sense of impending doom arises as documentarian Gabriela Cowperthwaite scrutinizes, in forensic detail, old footage of trainers’ key interactions with killer whales who’d been involved in violent incidents. We soon realize that it is not at all unusual for orcas to attack marine park staff, even with highly athletic trainers who follow protocol to the letter and who, in addition, adore the animals they train.

Ultimately, Blackfish is about more than just one kind of monster. Like the resort-town business leaders in Jaws, there are irresponsible figures in Blackfish ignoring all the evidence of a serious problem  – and prioritizing profit over life itself. Only in this case, they’re not fictitious, but real, and not just a few bad apples, but an entire corporate structure with an institutionalized pattern of lying to their employees and to the public. The documentary shows that SeaWorld’s public statements after the death or injury of its trainers tended to blame the trainers themselves, while maintaining a culture of internal secrecy. For example, a former trainer complains that when she was hired, SeaWorld already knew there had been dozens of incidents of whales attacking trainers, yet this was not disclosed to her. Indeed, it would seem that if SeaWorld really believed their arguments of ‘trainer error’, then they’d go out of their way to show their staff the footage leading up to the ‘accidents’ -- and to painstakingly review exactly what fatal errors their staff ought to take care to prevent. They did the opposite.

Much like the Robert Greenwald documentary Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, this documentary accumulates its accusations of carelessness, corner-cutting, and duplicity on the part of a big corporation until the evidence seems overwhelming. Cowperthwaite builds the case incrementally, conservatively -- she consults marine mammal experts as well as a large number of former trainers, but stays away from potentially incendiary advocates like animal rights leaders. She interviews one apologist  for  SeaWorld as well. And in publicity for the film, she maintains that she tried very hard to obtain interviews with spokespeople from the company -- however, they weren’t willing to participate in the documentary. They waited instead until it was about to open, then sent a letter to film critics calling the documentary dishonest, misleading, and scientifically inaccurate.

It is clear that SeaWorld was not doing its employees any favors sending them into the water with its orcas, but the movie also examines the effects, on the killer whales themselves, of captivity and of training to perform what are essentially circus tricks. The film does not want to make us fear killer whales as a species, the way Jaws made us afraid of sharks, and it points out that there are no reported incidents of orcas attacking humans in the wild. It is more about how they got to be this way, how their misery grew so intense that they felt the need to be violent.

Though other orcas are discussed, Blackfish focuses in particular on Tilikum’s story, as the most complete and the most horrific. Cowperthwaite has been able to unearth a fairly rich biography about Tilikum: from his childhood abduction on the ocean, through his apparent interest in learning and his joy at interacting with people, to his series of fatal assaults on humans. Blackfish becomes a study in the creation of orca psychopathology.

The grief orca families feel when ripped apart, the sensory deprivation the naturally far-ranging animals endure when shut up at night, and many other stressors are eloquently expressed. Experts weigh in on orcas’ advanced intelligence, complex social needs, and how different their normal behavior is in the wild from that seen in a tank; trainer testimony is provided attesting that in these marine parks the animals have been deprived of food or collectively punished if just one among them got a trick wrong; and visual evidence is supplied that whale-on-whale violence, a rare occurrence in the wild, is commonplace when these mammoth beasts are confined together in close quarters.  (One element of captivity that is overlooked, however, is how sonar bouncing back from the tank walls is a form of aural torture.)

Very intriguing scientific information is interwoven into the narrative. The discovery that orcas have an extra part of the brain that we don’t, a part that processes emotion, is fascinating. So is the description of killer whale cultures in the wild and how distinct they are from each other, even down to having completely different languages. Throwing animals from disparate families together, as is the norm in marine parks, is likened to throwing people from different nations together without interpreters. (You could also add that it’s like throwing them together in jail.) 

Part of the documentary re-enacts  SeaWorld’s hearings at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) over violations of safety law. A federal judge rejected SeaWorld’s position that it should be exempt from these laws; he ruled that a barrier must separate the trainers from the killer whales at all times for the workers’ protection.

This would, however, put an end to a major component of SeaWorld’s activities and the entertainment that they’ve been marketing for years -- so they’ve fought strenuously against the ruling. If the ban holds despite SeaWorld’s attempts to circumvent it, perhaps fewer trainers will be injured. That is hugely important.
Unfortunately, it won’t mean that life for the many orcas SeaWorld owns around the world will improve. The fact that trainers have been killed and injured is just the warning signal that something is very wrong – they are, if you will, the canaries in the gold mine. Blackfish never forgets that.

One particularly striking revelation of the film is how SeaWorld spreads blatant disinformation about the animals it houses -- despite the company’s pretences at fulfilling an educational function.  In order to make what they are doing look less terrible, SeaWorld lies to its staff about orca biology and sends them out in turn to lie to the public. This pertains to the most basic facts about orcas’ life expectancy (SeaWorld won’t admit that it’s less than half the length in captivity than it is in the wild) and about persistent signs of ill-health (because drooping dorsal fins on the animals’ backs are so common at the marine parks, the corporation promulgates the idea that it’s normal for dorsals to droop in the wild -- though others interviewed in the film state categorically this is untrue.)

In short, Blackfish depicts how SeaWorld betrays orca whales by kidnapping them, holding them captive, and mistreating them in the name of entertainment; how they betray their staff by endangering and misleading them, while abjuring accountability; and how they even betray the public, systematically deceiving them about the animals for whom they are supposed to be ambassadors.

The young swimming champs the corporation hires are seen in Blackfish starting out full of energy and enthusiasm, genuinely excited to be working at what they believe to be a fun and noble job where they will get to bond with special creatures. The trainers Cowperthwaite interviewed believed what SeaWorld told them in the early days, believed that killer whales actually enjoyed being in the tanks and performing, believed that this work elevated the stature of the species in the public eye. Many of these trainers now sound as if they are heartbroken -- and as if they came to that opinion in part by watching the orcas’ own broken hearts.

One of the saddest takeaways from a documentary full of lingering sadnesses is how SeaWorld exploits and abuses the positive feelings that many people have towards these impressive, mysterious leviathans. When I saw the film, a toddler sitting next to me had come to see it with his family and ecologist older sister. The little boy was obviously a fan of killer whales, clutching a stuffed orca toy in his arms the whole movie. His mother told me they had just been to SeaWorld two weeks before.  Obviously, it was hard for this small child to process all that cognitive dissonance. What he was a powerful symbol for, however, was another of SeaWorld’s offenses: that they take the fascination, awe and love for animals which children entrust them with and turn it all into dross.

Rebel, Rebel: "The Company You Keep" and "The East"

by Jennifer Epps

THE EAST

In The East, a film showcased at the Sundance Festival, co-writer and up-and-coming star Brit Marling plays Sarah, a young private-sector spy keen to do well for her agency. She has to keep her assignments so secret she tells her nearest and dearest she’s off to Dubai when really she’s just a drive away in the deep woods, infiltrating a troublesome band of youthful anti-corporate eco-terrorists. She lives with them, learns their ways, and becomes assimilated in order to uncover their schemes to disrupt big business – a service much coveted by those same businesses. But the experience is so intense, this monkey-wrench gang gradually starts to change her. Whenever the unit temporarily disbands and she heads back to her normal city life, she feels like she has come back from a foreign country, only now it’s her home that feels foreign.

The East is named after the fictitious anarchist collective Sarah spies on -- a mysterious, much-hyped group of rebels out to punish mega-corps which heartlessly destroy the planet or poison masses of human beings. The movie is many things – spy caper, romance, psychological drama, crime thriller, coming-of-age story, animal-friendly environmentalist lament – but it is perhaps predominantly a journey-to-another-world. Like Alice or Dorothy, once covert agent Sarah slips into the woods, she finds herself in an alien, Looking-Glass world. There are no surreal talking animals in this universe, but with the very first initiation rite Sarah can see she’s “not in Kansas anymore” – and that she’s out of her element. Tough as nails and primed for a fight, Sarah is astonished to discover that battle isn’t really the point here among all the soul-baring and trust exercises.

Of course, Sarah is a stand-in for the audience, so Marling and writing partner Zal Batmanglij (the film’s director) peel away the outer layers of the forest-dwelling radicals incrementally, letting us first see them the way she would. The most immediately alienating is Benji (an ardent Alexander Skarsgård), who comes off at first as a Charles Manson-like cult leader. His hair is archaically, kiddingly, long, and he appears to hold a privileged status in the commune-like encampment from which he delights in breaking newcomers’ spirits. Then there’s diminutive Izzy (Ellen Page), so solemn and ideologically fierce she seems like the most potentially dangerous. And though the group turns to Doc (Toby Kebbell) for medical help, his manner and his simple home remedies are so unorthodox his ministrations seem likely to do more harm than good. Yet before too long Benji’s wild tresses have been shorn, Izzy has revealed her soft side, Doc’s qualifications have been affirmed, and we, along with Sarah, have gained insights into this band’s traumas, regrets, and vision.

Though Batmanglij and Marling disapprove of these activists’ tactical choices when they injure others, we can see, eventually, how much respect they have for the young outliers’ heartfelt motivations, and for their willingness to explore an alternate form of living. Rather than just showing the surface trappings of counterculture, The East tries to get inside all this experimental living and find out what it’s really all about. (Marling and Batmanglij were inspired to write the film because they spent a few months living with squatting freegans.) And often the script is quite deft in the economical way it scores its points. The first dinner at the East’s remote hideout is a clever, visual way to show the group’s internal philosophy of interdependence. Then, at a climactic juncture, Sarah finds herself impulsively eating from a trashcan to illustrate the principles of freeganism – it’s a perfect merger of story, theme, character revelation, and eloquent speech-writing. It’s also a moment of humor/suspense that works beautifully.

Kudos are definitely due to Batmanglij and Marling for navigating a minefield with this kind of story: they could have easily fallen into preachiness either for or against their characters. Instead, Benji’s lynchpin character is variegated enough for Sarah and the audience to change our opinion of him in each of the film’s three acts. Likewise Sarah’s boss at the agency, the wonderful Patricia Clarkson, is never a cartoon but moves deliciously from mentor to formidable opponent.

The East doesn’t make us choose between collectivism and the power of one – it honors both. Its slight of build yet tightly-coiled heroine – thanks to a visceral performance by the ferociously intelligent Marling -- is a mesmerizing protagonist. She’s no latex-squeezed, ultra-competent action-heroine, but is instead serious and resourceful, sensitive and relatable, and she pays a high cost for her achievements. But after learning about harmony, equality, and unity from the rebels, she comes out the other side as an exemplar of the idea that one person can make a difference. It is thanks to her dynamic character that the film is able to pull off its balancing act, conveying the notion that: in questions of morality, even when the goals are harmony, equality, and unity, perhaps one’s own conscience is the only reliable arbiter.

Along the way, Marling and Batmanglij expose something that gets very scant attention – corporate spying on citizen activists – and at a time when Edward Snowden has made people more conscious of the extent to which our communications are being captured as a matter of course, this film couldn’t be more timely. Without lecturing (except briefly, in the sequence where Izzy confronts her CEO dad), The East manages to convey searing criticism of current business as usual in the U.S. of A. It is one of the most eloquent and vital movies indicting late capitalism you could hope to see, underpinning its twisty, surprising climax with the burning philosophical problem: how can we save the world?

The film provides no easy answers but is on the side of the angels -- it promotes, without spelling it out too much, mutual respect, co-operation, open-mindedness, and educating the public. It is clear that Batmanglij and Marling believe in film as a force for social change. But they also realize that to be effective they must be disciplined in providing us with compelling characters, a gripping conflict, and a tight story structure. They deliver all that in spades. The East lays down the gauntlet for other fiction filmmakers to retain a strong point-of-view on hot political topics and make an exciting entertainment to boot.

THE COMPANY YOU KEEP

Robert Redford’s Sundance Festival gave Batmanglij and Marling’s film its premiere, and Redford even cast Marling in a pivotal supporting role in his own film The Company You Keep -- clearly he wasn’t concerned about the similarities between the two indies, though they were released within weeks of each other this spring. There certainly are similarities, though. The East and The Company You Keep are both thought-provoking political thrillers about a small group of domestic left-wing militants who are designated as terrorists by authorities. Both show the radicals’ driving forces to be reactions against mass-scale atrocities perpetrated by those in power. And both films clearly condemn violence as a tool of political resistance.

Still, Redford’s film has its own precedents. It seems to make sense to view The Company You Keep as the third film in a Redford trilogy about the ‘War on Terror’. I haven’t heard him describe any such trilogy, but Redford’s last three films seem very much concerned with the post 9/11 era and the direction the country has taken. The first, Lions for Lambs (2007), was a politically laudable but artistically dull and didactic Bush-era anti-war screed. The second, the superb and moving drama The Conspirator (2010), was set in the maelstrom right after Lincoln’s assassination yet was indisputably modern in its portrait of the oppressiveness of railroading military tribunals like those Bush had brought into the fore as part of the ‘War on Terror.’ Most of the referents in Redford’s third film of the trilogy, The Company You Keep, are to the 1960’s and 1970’s, but the film is set in modern times, and its subject matter is terrorism, unjust war, and dissent. No doubt it wasn’t just a historical exercise.

The Company You Keep, like Redford’s prior two films, is the story of an older man, an educated liberal, who mentors an antagonistic or disengaged young upstart. In Lions for Lambs it was Redford as a university prof teaching apathetic student Andrew Garfield to care more about what his government is up to; in The Conspirator it was Tom Wilkinson handing over a complex defense case to Civil War veteran James McAvoy. Here it is Redford once again, as an aging attorney who is an upstanding citizen working for the public good. He scolds cocky rookie reporter Ben (Shia LaBeouf) – even while fleeing him half-way across the country. The chase begins because LaBeouf’s ambitious stringer discovers that Redford’s small-town lawyer is a big-time outlaw, an ex-member of a militant 1960’s group, and a fugitive from the FBI because of his secret terrorist past. 

The mentoring dynamic throughout Redford’s trilogy may simply be a natural outcome of Redford being in his 70’s and being highly successful, sought-after, and opinionated. Yet, if there’s one overriding aspect of Company which prevents it from being truly politically effective, it might be the film’s underlying ageism – an elevation of those politicos over 60 and a patronizing slant on the uninformed under-40s. The movie evinces an implicit belief that Hippies were much more aware and engaged than Tweeters are. The politicized people in Company are all above a certain age (played by Redford, Nick Nolte, Sam Elliott, Julie Christie, Susan Sarandon, Richard Jenkins, and Brendan Gleeson). By contrast, none of the young adults in the film (LaBoeuf, Marling, Anna Kendrick, and Terrence Howard, who plays an FBI agent) are politically opinionated – except, perhaps, about terrorism. The ex-hippies express passionate views in the film on current events, but the young people are more concerned with their careers, schooling, and personal lives. It’s weird that the retirement-age radicals who flee to the deep woods in Company somehow have no idea that anyone like the young rebels of The East could be hiding out too; in Company’s world, activism seems to have halted in the mid 1970s.

This isn’t to say the youngsters don’t have winning personalities. LaBoeuf’s cheeky, devious, irreverent reporter uses some of the sly techniques Redford himself used, alongside Dustin Hoffman, in All the President’s Men. He is also the Tommy Lee Jones character to Redford’s Harrison Ford, for just as in The Fugitive we find ourselves pulled in both directions, unsure whether to root for pursuer or pursued. But ultimately, the view of the press evinced by Company is that it is both shallow and overzealous: Ben’s doggedness in pursuing the ex-Weatherman is cast in a similar vein as Sally Field’s destructive investigative reporting in Absence of Malice.

Unlike the fictitious anti-corporate group living on the fringes in The East, the organization under scrutiny in Company is a real domestic terrorist organization: the infamous albeit small revolutionary group which dubbed themselves the Weather Underground Organization (WUO), formed in 1969 as a splinter of the Students for a Democratic Society. Discouraged by the failure of mass protest to end either the war in Vietnam or virulent racism at home, the Weather Underground chose to make bombs and try to overthrow the U.S. government. They were of course eschewed and condemned by the large protest movements of the time, but became more infamous.

Though the kernel of Company is based on actual history, the names of the former Weather members are fictional and the characters composites. Dramatic license is taken to fashion a mystery about decisions of the past. It is not a literal evaluation of the Weathermen, it doesn’t care about the exact details of their tactics, whether there was any discipline to their goals of property destruction (warnings were generally issued so buildings could be evacuated) or how exactly they crossed the line into violence against living beings. (There is a documentary about the Weathermen to cover that, however – Ben is even shown watching it as research in this movie.) The facts, which Company doesn’t dwell over, are that three members of the WUO died while bomb-building, and three security officers were killed during a Brinks truck robbery staged by a couple of ex- WUO members -- who got sentenced to life, and 22 years, in prison. But Company is quite vague about the internal workings of WUO, or what led to the deaths of innocent people, because its characters are composites and because it doesn’t recreate the events of the fateful day – it is enough for the moral probing of the movie simply to establish that people died. There is a central mystery, but it manages to lie beyond the details of the long-ago crime; the film is not much interested in forensics, and focused instead on the human heart.

Screenwriter Lem Dobbs has adapted Neil Gordon’s novel The Company You Keep for this film. It is a book first published in 2003, long before the McCain-Palin campaign brought the Weather Underground back into the spotlight with charges that co-founder Bill Ayers knew Obama in Chicago. But the novel did emerge as Bush was laying the groundwork to make the world America’s battlefield. And like The East, this story asks the question of whether or not the ends justify the means, of whether criminally violent resistance against powerful criminals is warranted when the system itself is so violent to so many. Not too surprisingly, the answer in both films is no.

Author Gordon seems especially pissed off at the WUO: “I don’t think highly of the positions the Weather Underground took and I don’t believe that political violence was an effective or appropriate tool”, he told an interviewer. And he blames the WUO for an awful lot: “when Weather broke up SDS, which they did violently, undemocratically, and with huge cruelty, they destroyed what could have been an enormous, powerful progressive movement in this country…The American left never recovered.”

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The trouble with having two back-to-back films which debate a choice between violent and non-violent resistance is that, surely, non-violence won that debate for most people long ago. It is not a major question for the millions of people who oppose corporate and imperialist agendas. Given that it sure isn’t every day that features about left-wing dissent hit the big screen, when two in the same season depict committed grassroots activism as extremist, violent militancy, there is definitely the chance of creating the wrong impression about those movements. And right-wing blowhards would love to milk that wrong impression and spread it to PETA, Greenpeace, peace marchers, and many others who try to fight the systems of cruelty and oppression the right would like to protect.

Of course, that is not what any of these filmmakers would want. Neil Gordon argues: “There is a great pathos to the history of the American left. Its death is the saddest story of our country…[W]hen we look at it from the vantage of today, where America, for all its power, has near–pariah status throughout the world, it can only make us long for the lost ideals of our country.” Both films want to take a complex view, to mourn the wasted opportunities for change when people with noble motives abandon core principles. Both of them keep alive the idea that an unjust system and the need for resistance still remain.

The flaw with the approach of nostalgia and bitter regret in Company is that though the characters may find clarity, they don’t offer much of a solution to the audience  – beyond an assertion that parents should take care of their children. (Despite his age, Redford’s character is often shown, in rather cloying scenes, as a dutiful father to a prepubescent daughter, and his commitment is a pillar of the film.) It’s true that nothing requires art to provide solutions, and often asking questions or exposing problems is enough. But we are dealing with the future of the planet and human civilization, and it would be nice to have something to go on. I get that the theme of Company is the importance of taking personal responsibility, and that this could very well be interpreted as a responsibility to become more active and engaged. But the metaphor of progeny-over-politics could also make any conservative family-values champion proud – they might not admit it, but that message is right up their alley. It is also, whether intentionally or not, a kind of argument in favor of disengagement.

The East takes a different approach from The Company You Keep in many ways. The characters feel rawer and more immediate. It’s less reserved, and it has a more youthful energy. And it has more relevance in the issues it presents: it’s about the state of the union right now, and the examples of corporate lawlessness targeted by the East’s members are loosely based on true recent instances. But perhaps the most important difference of all is that The East suggests at the very end – fleetingly and delicately – a way out of this mess of corporate mayhem and crimes against humanity. And that, ultimately, is a discussion well worth having.

Chimpanzee Ascendancy: Pan Troglodyte’s New Status in Policy & in Films

Originally published on Daily Kos on April 25, 2013.

Charles Darwin turned 204 this year, but his birthday didn't make as big of a splash as Abe Lincoln's (both were born February 12, 1809) because Darwin didn't have a giant Hollywood epic movie playing in theatres. But those who champion what Darwin revealed, or who care about great apes and their intelligence, might want to look into the DVDs of several movies from recent years in honor of Earth Week.

All four great apes suffer when confined in captivity (over 3000 great apes are held in captivity in the U.S.); at the same time, they are disappearing from the wild due to poaching and habitat loss. Things are pretty serious for all of our great ape cousins, but it is our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, who have arguably had it the worst because in addition to other evils, they have been subjected to brutal experimentation in labs, abused by the entertainment industry, exploited by the pet trade, and even been sacrificed in space.

Fortunately, after many decades of struggle by their advocates, things are starting to look up for the chimpanzee, or Pan Troglodyte. At least it seems so judging by their gains in federal policy and public support, and the enlightened ways they have been depicted in several notable recent movies as an indicator of an improvement in how filmmakers think we see apes.

POLICY

Chimps as Experimental Subjects

The U.S., the only developed country still using this species in invasive medical experiments, has now taken significant strides toward cutting down their use by labs. First, a December 2011 Institute of Medicine report commissioned by the National Institute of Health (NIH) concluded that "€˜most current use of chimpanzees for biomedical research is unnecessary"€™. A committee of experts then set about scrutinizing all NIH-funded projects making use of chimps. Within 9 months, the NIH authorized the retirement of 113 government-owned chimpanzees, and began transferring them to sanctuaries. Moreover, in January of this year a NIH task force of scientists, the Health Working Group, deemed laboratories unable to meet the needs of chimpanzees and called for a halt to the breeding of chimpanzees and a gradual end to existing biomedical research grants for projects with chimps. They recommended the government retire 300 other chimps from its labs, suggesting just 50 chimps be retained for possible future experiments.

This is long-overdue progress and will have a real practical effect on the quality of life of these chimps. This is clearly evident from footage this spring of freshly released NIH research chimps seeing sunlight and the outdoors for the first time after decades of incarceration. However, if invasive research and the keeping of chimpanzees in laboratory facilities is inhumane, then it'€™s just as inhumane for the unfortunate 50 chimps who have to stay behind. And Stephen Rene Tello, the executive director of Texas-based sanctuary Primarily Primates, has other concerns, since the government is maintaining ownership of all the chimps. "€œWhat happens if someone decides they suddenly need chimpanzees for research again?€" Tello fears: "they'll send them right back to the labs."

Meanwhile, research on chimps continues in the private sector. While the efforts of animal protection agencies have raised awareness, and a string of pharmaceutical companies such as Idenix Pharmaceuticals, GlaxoSmithKline, Novo Nordisk and Gilead Sciences, Inc. have promised not to use chimps in their research, there are still 950 chimps in labs in the U.S. being used as industrial test subjects.

Thankfully, a strong movement exists to persuade Congress to pass the Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act, a bill to ban the use of chimpanzees in invasive research (and save the Treasury $250 million dollars in a decade). The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), a group that both opposes vivisection and advocates for human health (and whose legislative leader is Dennis Kucinich's wife Elizabeth), is one of the organizations passionately campaigning for this bill, which has been introduced by allies in session after session. PCRM reports the encouraging news that the bill garnered record support in the 112th congress, with close to 200 co-sponsors in the House and Senate. Its supporters will be back to try again. The film world and Washington politics meet here, as James Franco, the headliner of Rise of the Planet of the Apes, also endorsed the Great Ape Protection and Cost Savings Act in this PCRM video.

Chimps as Entertainers

The world of entertainment and policy intersect in another way where great apes are concerned. An international campaign is afoot to end the use of great apes as performers in entertainment (chimps and orangutans being the ones generally used) and it is spearheaded by tireless chimpanzee champion Jane Goodall, as well as by national animal advocacy groups such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS). The opposition stems in part from the fact that there is no way to police how the animals are trained -- though the American Humane Association (AHA) monitors the treatment of animal performers while they're on set, no-one assesses the techniques the trainers use in private to condition the animals to obey their commands. (And moreover, there are numerous criticisms of the integrity of the AHA's monitoring operations, which have very limited authority and which are financed by the studios themselves.)

Plenty of incidents have been recorded of routine brutality toward ape actors, who begin their careers at very young ages, while they can still be dominated by human beings. The allegations of chimp abuse on the set of 2008's Speed Racer are just the tip of the iceberg. Primatologist Sarah Baeckler, who witnessed a culture of beatings of young performing chimps as a volunteer at Amazing Animal Actors ranch in Malibu, points out: "Healthy, young chimpanzees are playful, curious, energetic, and mischievous, but these traits don'€™t serve them well when training begins, so one of the things that chimpanzees in the entertainment industry have to endure is an initial 'breaking of the spirit'.€™ In other words, they have to learn how NOT to act like normal chimpanzees." Baeckler goes on to state that "abuse and physical violence are seemingly commonplace in this industry, and it'€™s not even a secret. In fact, it€'s taught in a training school [Moorpark College's Exotic Animal Training and Management program] that is currently producing many future animal trainers and zoo workers."€ One indicator of how prevalent the abuse may be is the ubiquitousness of chimp performers €'grin' - far from being gleeful, that grimace on chimpanzees is an expression of fear.

When apes get older they are no longer manageable even by brutes (typically, an 8 year-old chimp is already too dangerous to keep), and so they are sent to live somewhere else, often a sub-par roadside zoo where their housing and care are inadequate and they are isolated and bored. (Decent, accredited zoos won'€™t accept them because apes in such zoos now live in group installations, and chimps reared among humans are at sea in the complicated dynamics of chimp society; they can'€™t protect themselves from the aggression of dominant chimps.)

If they are lucky enough to end up at an enlightened ape sanctuary, this places the burden for their care on the philanthropic animal-charity community. The trainers who profited off of them (and traumatized them) just go on to acquire other young chimps.

And there are even more far-reaching reasons to ban the use of ape actors. A 2008 survey found that the public is less likely to think that chimpanzees are endangered compared to other great apes. This may well be partly because chimps are so familiar to viewers from their use in commercials, circuses, and on greeting cards. (The truth is all four types of great apes are endangered.) A 2011 study by Ross et al. has shown the power of even simple imagery: participants who were shown photos of a chimp standing next to a human were 35.5% less likely to deem chimpanzees as endangered or declining than those who saw photos of chimps alone.

These images can also boost the pet trade: participants who viewed these photos of chimps coexisting with humans were 30% more likely to believe that a chimp would make a good pet. (Charla Nash, the Connecticut woman who was attacked by former-performer Travis in 2009, would beg to differ, since her encounter with the 200-pound male chimp resulted in her face and hands being ripped off; she is now blind, has had a full face transplant, and now has to live in a nursing home at age 57).

Some celebrities have taken a stand against the use of ape actors in entertainment, like Angelica Huston, Alec Baldwin, Cameron Diaz, and Bob Barker. And public pressure campaigns have convinced numerous companies --€“ including Capital One, Dodge, Pizza Factory, and Pfizer -- to can chimp ads for good.

However, Career Builder has been for several years one of the most prolific employers of chimpanzee performers through its series of humorous, office-based, TV ads.

Even though the trainer of the chimps used in the ads has been excoriated for cruelty by animal activists -€“- and his first round of chimps has already been shuffled off to sanctuaries -- Career Builder has taken a defiant stand for several years when faced with complaints against its ads. For example, Stephen Ross of Lincoln Park Zoo's Fisher Center for the Study and Conservation of Apes in Chicago has submitted his objections to Career Builder every year since 2005 without receiving a reply. (This is in spite of the fact that a Duke University study found that the ads were not even very effective.)

But there may be some good news: in 2013 Career Builder refrained from buying air time during the Super Bowl, as they had so often done. It is still too early to tell whether they will stop using chimp performers. They have made no such promises.

PORTRAYAL ON FILM

And there is yet more on the plus side, especially for those who care about film and its social impact. Listed below are five recent movies, straddling a range of genres, which depict chimps in enlightened ways which communicate that our evolutionary siblings are highly social, intelligent, and sensitive animals. Two of these movies are strong indictments against conducting medical research on chimpanzees, and none of these films utilize trained chimpanzees as performers. Instead they used performance capture, puppet animatronics, documentary file footage, patient nature photography, and claymation.

The filmmakers here often employ a shorthand which suggests that they believe the audience already has a high level of respect for chimpanzees, and that it is ready to believe in quite sophisticated simian abilities. This is very encouraging because it is surely an inevitable step from that belief to a conviction that chimpanzees deserve far better treatment from us.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011)
Directed by Rupert Wyatt; with Andy Serkis, James Franco, Freida Pinto, John Lithgow, and David Oyelowo

This blockbuster reboot of the 1968 - 1975 franchise of films and TV programs has a very powerful resonance with current animal rights thinking. It recasts the story of Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972) inventively and believably: unlike the original series in which apes came to gain human skills gradually, Rise of the Planet of the Apes shows a chimpanzee becoming super-intelligent virtually overnight, thanks to an experimental gene therapy which speeds up neurological development. Thus the filmmakers are not just floating around in a purely hypothetical sci-fi ether, they are basing their speculative fiction on the fact that chimps already often score at the level of young human children on psychological and intelligence tests. The circumstances under which this gene therapy gets discovered are also realistic: the motive is profit, a pharmaceutical company which experiments on chimps in trying to find a cure for Alzheimer's.

This adds up to a terrific solution to the problem that had plagued numerous directors and writers trying to find a way back into the franchise. Peter Jackson, Oliver Stone, James Cameron, Sam Raimi, and the Hughes brothers all tried to crack that nut at some point. (Nut-cracking being a type of tool use which it turns out we share with Pan troglodytes.) I believe that director Rupert Wyatt and the screenwriters, Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, succeeded where others failed (including Tim Burton in his decent but rather uninspired 2001 rehash) because they genuinely tried to see the world from an ape'€™s point of view. And since they were prepared to get real about how deplorably we treat these animals, they didn'€™t have to invent an alternate civilization and the layers of legend and custom some of the earlier films in the series did. Rise of the Planet of the Apes is very similar to our own society, and how we subjugate apes right now. The main difference between the real world and the movie’s is that in the film the apes can do something about it.

Rise came out of nowhere to wow audiences and that wasn'€™t just because of exciting action sequences or extremely convincing special effects. Surely one reason this film defied expectations was because no-one had anticipated how strongly it would provoke empathy with its animal hero. Usually films that make the plight of an animal central are meant for kids (though now with the addition of War Horse to the game as well, that may be changing). ButRise is an adult and weighty film that avoids sentimentality. And even though it gives apes abilities they don'€™t normally have, it more or less transcends anthropomorphism by showing how those abilities are acquired in practical terms. And also by building a sophisticated awareness of Caesar'€™s wishes and desires, all of which are completely believable. Caesar is not out to take up tap-dancing or learn kung-fu. Caesar and his comrades just want freedom and dignity, and they want it on simian terms --€“ they're not campaigning for better pay; they just want to get out of their cages, get away from their abusers, and go live in some trees.

The original Planet of the Apes franchise consciously evoked the hotbed of race relations that marked that era. There are still some references to those symbols in Rise: the types of oppression we see; the way in which the rebellion develops; the classic line "€œTake your stinking paws off me, you damn dirty ape"€; the loaded image of a water hose being used as a weapon. And the revolution in Rise begins as a prison revolt led by Caesar -- which is not just a look back at Attica, but has contemporary relevance too (as witnessed by the week-long prisoner strike in six Georgia prisons the year before Rise came out).

But when Rise begins with a young chimp being forcibly captured in the African jungle, traumatically ripped away from his mother, it seems to be making "€œthe dreaded comparison"€ - the comparison, to cite Marjorie Spiegel'€™s term, between human slavery and animal slavery. This feeling, that the oppression of animals in Rise is not just an analogy for something else but the thing itself, continues to be felt in the brutality of the medical lab scenes and the 'prison'€™ scenes at the animal shelter.

Whereas the 1970's Planets movies often cast people of color in mediator roles --€“ they often empathized with the underdogs because, it was implied, they understood it from their own history -- only Freida Pinto comes close to fulfilling that role in Rise. (She'€™s a vet who loves chimps.) But her role is essentially decorative. More key to the plot is Jacobs, the black CEO of the pharmaceutical company (David Oyelowo). He impacts directly on the apes'€™ future. And he actually has no empathy for the oppressed. He is driven by the profit motive, and has no feeling for the chimps at all --€“ or even for the well-being of society. He just wants his company to patent a cure for Alzheimer'€™s because it'€™s lucrative. His presence suggests the debasement of political consciousness in a consumerist paradigm; but it also underscores the notion that the apes are the most oppressed group in the movie'€™s class system. Being human, no matter what your race, brings you great privileges compared to animals'€™ lot. Being human makes you ultimately blind to the suffering of those who are non-human.

But beyond issues of the oppression of certain groups, Rise also makes us aware of the idea of consciousness within an individual. Rise differs from its 1972 predecessor Conquest of the Planet of the Apes in that we see Caesar acquire language skills as a young chimp (the filmmakers can rely on our knowledge of sign language experiments with apes; it isn'€™t remarkable to the movie'€™s scientist-hero that Caesar learns signs, merely that he learns so many, and so quickly). And we are able to see Caesar'€™s coming-of-age through his self-awareness. While little, he feels safe and secure in his adoptive human family, but one day when he is older, he notices that humans take their dogs for walks on a leash --€“ and that he too is on a leash. It occurs to him for the first time that maybe he is "a pet."€™ In this stirring moment he becomes conscious of himself in a new way; he begins to feel loneliness and resentment not unlike what the Creature in Frankenstein experiences when he realizes that he will never actually truly belong to human society.

The other similarity Rise has with Frankenstein is the theme of science run amok --€“ after all, the researcher played by James Franco inadvertently brings on the demise of human civilization by messing with chimpanzee brain chemistry. Unfortunately, this theme is rather commonplace and mundane (you’ve seen it over and over again, from the John Lithgow thriller Raising Cain to the monster movie Jurassic Park). The root of it seems a little superstitious: as if you€'d better not '€˜play God'€™ or God might punish you. It'€™s the kind of thing that sparks Christian fundamentalist opposition to stem cell research.

But what Rise does that I find more gratifying than the Frankensteinian retread is that it vividly condemns the use of chimps in medical research. Even without enhanced brain-power, it is clear they are suffering in the lab. Moreover, the gene therapy that Franco tries out on his Alzheimer'€™s-diagnosed father (Lithgow) begins well but soon starts to make his dad fatally ill, because it does something far different to humans than to apes. In other words, the filmmakers take as a key plot device the very argument anti-vivisectionists make when they are trying to appeal to people on practical terms: humans and non-humans are not biologically identical, and testing substances on non-humans still doesn'€™t make them safe for humans. (Chimps may be our closest relatives, but that doesn'€™t mean they get menopause, breast cancer, or prostate cancer, to name a few differences.) Rise also warns us that research run by the private sector on purely capitalist principles has strong potential for greed, short-sighted thinking, and irresponsibility.

Who knows if the sequel to Rise of the Planet of the Apes will comment so directly on the current plight of great apes. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, which is currently filming and slated for a 2014 release, reportedly takes place in the midst of the plague decimating the human population of Earth -- set up briefly in the exciting coda to Rise. The film has different faces (Jason Clarke, Keri Russell, Judy Greer, Gary Oldman) and will not be directed by Wyatt again. Moreover, two additional screenwriters have padded the list of writers out to four. This is a little worrying in terms of what the movie'€™s focus might be, but it is encouraging to learn (as I did at a public lecture on primates on Darwin Day) that the makers of the film consulted with leading primatologist and spokesperson for ape conservation Dr. Craig Stanford, the author of Planet Without Apes and co-director of the Jane Goodall Research Center at USC.

It is also reassuring that Dawn of the Planet of the Apes will bring back the true star of Rise, the British-born character actor Andy Serkis --€“ now best known for iconic motion-capture roles like Gollum, King Kong, Tintin'€™s buddy Captain Haddock. The content of Rise is terrific, and the incredible realism of the special effects is the best argument against using actual apes as performers, but what really makes this a film that can change hearts and minds is the depth and delicacy Serkis brings to Caesar'™s internal life.

Project Nim (2011)
Directed by James Marsh; with Nim Chimpsky, Herbert Terrace, Bob Ingersoll, Stephanie LaFarge, and Cleveland Amory (as themselves).

James Marsh, the director of the impish, Oscar-winning documentary Man on Wire, also won documentary awards for Project Nim from Sundance, the DGA, and the Boston Society of Film Critics. He has assembled this film adaptation of Elizabeth Hess'€™ non-fiction book Nim: The Chimp Who Thought He Was Human from a wealth of archival footage, interviews with the key players in this peculiar 1970'€™s history, and occasional dramatic recreations using animatronics. In press on the documentary, Marsh has pointed out how unusual it is for a film to tell the biography of an animal (though the documentary One Lucky Elephant was released around the same time and did something similar). Indeed, the important Project Nim comes as close to letting Nim Chimpsky tell his own harrowing and heart-wrenching story as a film about a chimpanzee can perhaps do. Nim was the famous male chimp who, as a baby and young child, was the subject of behavioral psychologist Herbert Terrace'€™s headline-grabbing ape language study -- Terrace set out to teach Nim ASL as part of a Columbia University experiment.

But when Terrace rather abruptly ended the project and the cameras went away, Nim'€™s story turned bleak and Dickensian: snatched from any human family and thrust into a cage in a primate center, shocked with an electric prod to discipline him; then, soon after, sent to a lab doing invasive research to test vaccines. The way Project Nim operates, in fact, is quite close to a Dickens novel: by asking us to empathize with the hardships undergone by a waif growing up in a cold, cruel society that doesn'€™t understand him, we are given what we need to realize how many like him must still suffer in similar ways. Whether Marsh intended it or not, Project Nim is a strong argument for reform.

Despite the subtitle of the source material for the film, being a €'Chimp Who Thought He Was Human'€™ was not really Nim'€™s problem. It was the ways in which he was treated like he wasn'€™thuman that were the real problem. In short, the way chimps in captivity are treated all the time. He was stolen from his mother at 2 weeks of age (which was cruel to her too, especially since that had already happened to her 6 times), he was enculturated into a human family and then abandoned by that surrogate parent too (a free-spirited woman who'€™d actually insisted on breast-feeding him). In a short space of time he was abandoned by another surrogate mother, then another, then his first male friend. And so on. He was eventually removed (through deception) to a new and utterly foreign location, and banished from human culture to find himself at sea in a bewildering and dangerous hierarchy of apes --€“ creatures he'€™d grown up the last few years without ever laying eyes on. (It seems quite likely the makers of Rise of the Planet of the Apes read Nim'€™s story as research, because Caesar goes through an almost identical trauma.)

One of the most disturbing moments in this ground-breaking film comes when it is revealed how many chimpanzees who had participated in a fad of sign language instruction and human enculturation projects ended up in medical research labs. The chimps try to sign to the human lab workers in vain --€ the staff don'€™t speak sign --€“ and when a lexicon is developed to understand what the chimps are trying to communicate, it turns out the chimps have been signing such words as "€œkey," "open,€" "out," "€œshoes," "€œplay," and "€œhug."€ These are the same beings who the lab workers strap down to tables to draw blood or to give injections; not only do they look very human in those supine poses, but they also look disarmingly like Christ on the cross. Meanwhile, Marsh includes powerful testimony from Dr. James Mahoney, a scientist who oversaw the lab in question and who ultimately became a bit of an Oskar Schindler. Mahoney himself points out that given apes’ intelligence, keeping them in medical labs "€œcan'€™tbe humane."

The whole section on Nim's incarceration in the research lab is gripping; numerous people work behind the scenes to try to rescue him from there, but it'€™s very difficult because --€“ and this is another way, of course, that Nim was treated differently than a human being -- he isowned by others. He is chattel. The film doesn’t get into the '€˜personhood'€™ question, but it lays groundwork for it.

Marsh does an admirable, deeply moving, highly disciplined job creating empathy for his eponymous chimpanzee. (There's never a moment of sentimentality or polemicism.) Still, I think he neglects context that his subject matter cries out for. When Terrace comes out with the bold conclusion that Nim never did acquire language skills but merely "€œlearned how to beg"€, Marsh includes TV footage of the announcement but returns quickly to Nim'€™s predicament. Marsh doesn'€™t give Terrace'€™s detractors in the ape language study community a voice --€“ even though Terrace'€™s pronouncements had a far-reaching negative effect on their own work, including, I suspect, on their funding.

Perhaps one reason for Marsh'€™s decision can be gleaned from interviews he gave to promote the movie; he doesn'€™t seem to believe that Nim was ever capable of learning language. The documentary itself contains plenty of nuggets that seem to attest to the contrary: Nim signs spontaneously at all of his foster homes, trying to get humans to respond to him; one of Nim'€™s companions, Bob Ingersoll, recalls when they hiked together and Nim would sign to him: "œHe talked about trees, berries he found"€; after a long separation, when Nim sees Bob again, he immediately starts signing to him; when Nim eventually gets a lady-chimp roommate, he teaches her signs. But Marsh seems to accept Terrace'€™s interpretation of Project Nim, perhaps afraid to question his scientific expertise. (This despite the fact Marsh frequently presents Terrace as a very unattractive personality, and his experimental structure as completely slapdash and chaotic).

This acceptance is especially regrettable because the book Marsh used as the film's basis draws a different conclusion. "Nim had a vocabulary. He learned all these signs, and he could communicate with them," author Hess says. Hess also provides significant background on ape language studies in her book, so Marsh can'€™t plead he was ignorant of other scientists'€™ claims. Yet the numerous scientists who have conducted much longer-range studies than Terrace (not only on chimps, but on gorillas, orangutans, and even the much less well-known species, bonobos) are notably absent from the film.

Anyone who has watched enough footage of Francine Patterson signing with Koko the gorilla, for instance, can readily see why Terrace may have gotten very different results from hers. What is most striking about Patterson'€™s recorded interactions with Koko (evident in various TV specials but most remarkably in the 1978 Barbet Schroeder feature Koko, a Talking Gorilla) is how fully Patterson gives Koko her undivided attention, how she treats her as a mind on the same plane as her own. It is the way the most effective teachers talk to children --€“ with respect, with affection --€“ rather than the way adults who don'€™t like kids will talk to them patronizingly, domineeringly, or confrontationally. Koko is not '€˜the gorilla who talked' so much as Patterson is the human who listened; and even if Marsh doesn'€™t realize the significance of it, his Project Nim documents how deplorably Terrace failed to do that.

The Pirates! Band of Misfits (2012)
Directed by Peter Lord and Jeff Newitt; with Hugh Grant, Martin Freeman, Imelda Staunton, Jeremy Piven, Salma Hayek, and Ashley Jensen

This claymation film by Aardman Animations, the irrepressible British studio known for the Wallice and Gromit characters and the delightful Arthur Christmas, is a Monty Pythonesque pirate romp through Victorian times adapted by comic writer Gideon Defoe from his own children'€™s novel. (The original title is charmingly inelegant: The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! ) Anchored by an almost unrecognizable vocal performance by Hugh Grant as the Pirate Captain (perhaps the best comic delivery in his career), the movie was nominated for an Academy Award and a European Film Award for best animated film. It is not a film about a chimpanzee like the above two features were. But it does have supporting characters who make it relevant to this discussion.

This comedy features a hilariously irreverent take on Charles Darwin (posh but whiny David Tennant) as a nerd who has spent so much time dissecting barnacles he has no love life --€“ and as a schemer who will stoop to anything to get ahold of the pirates'€™ prize possession, a dodo. This deliberately wacky 19th century free-for-all is not meant to be historically accurate, which is part of its giddy appeal: a dodo has somehow appeared several hundred years after they went extinct; the Elephant Man shows up alongside Jane Austen, though they were decades apart; the pirates engage in an annual contest for best pirate and the emcee dresses like Elvis; and the Pirate King mimes to a friend "€˜phone me€". But my favorite anachronism is the fact that Darwin, straight off the ship and before he even has an inkling of his landmark theory, is keeping a tame chimpanzee in his townhouse and teaching him human culture and language just like a psychologist in the U.S. in the 1970'€™s might have done.

This chimpanzee, Mr. Bobo, becomes a key character in the film -- part butler, part henchman, all-brain (he'€™s often the sanest and most resourceful '€˜person' in the room, not unlike the servant character in a lot of classic plays). Of course that is anthropomorphism, but the movie sets up a logic for it akin to the dog-translator collars invented by the mad scientist in Up. Mr. Bobo doesn'€™t speak, per se, he just holds up cards silently to comment on the action. This is satisfyingly redolent of methods used by scientists in real life to teach the bonobo Kanzi -- who is said by primatologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh to know 384 words/symbols (lexigrams taught to him on computer-based keyboards).

The filmmakers at Aardman exploit their Charles Darwin character (with great affection) for some of the funniest gags, in a comedy that is already very funny. At one point, the Pirate Captain responds to pre-Origin of Species Darwin'€™s moping and depression with: "We didn'€™t evolve from slugs just so we could sit around drinking our own sweat." Yet Darwin fails to pick up on the clue. In another scene, Charles and his chimpanzee sit side by side in a bar eating bags of '€˜monkey nuts'€™.  The Pirate Captain sees something in them for a moment: "€œAre you two related? There is a resemblance."

And Band of Misfits not only features a smart chimpanzee and a sweet, pudgy dodo (who doesn't speak, and whose behavior is believably bird-like), it also comes up with a villain who is even nastier to animals than Cruella de Vil of 101 Dalmations (or the rabbit-hunting Lord Victor Quartermaine in Aardman'€™s own, also animal-friendly, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit). I won’t give it away, but the villain'€™s dastardly scheme cleverly allows this irrepressible film to both mock the rich elite and skewer ignorant, selfish attitudes toward rare animals.

The nightmarish medical experimentation on chimps we see in Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Project Nim doesn'€™t come up here --€“ perhaps because the often animal-oriented Britain stopped using great apes for medical research in 1986 -- but at the end of Band of Misfits, like at the end of Rise, the chimpanzee who has learned to communicate from a scientist surrogate-dad doesn'€™t choose to stay with the human parent who raised him. Mr. Bobo, like Caeser, chooses freedom.

Chimpanzee (2012)
Directed by Alastair Fothergill and Mark Linfield

This Disney Nature documentary follows the trials and tribulations of a 3-month old male chimp child who lives with a troop of wild chimpanzees in the forest in Gombe National Park in Tanzania. Oscar loses his mother due to inter-tribal warfare, and, orphaned, he is treated as a pariah by all other members of his simian society until, too young to fend for himself, it seems certain he will die. His sudden adoption by Freddy, the alpha male of the troop, is a dramatic and moving turnaround that provides a beguiling glimpse into the mysterious intricacies of chimpanzee emotions.

Much of the ethology we've come to know about chimps is on display here, a kind of refresher course --€“ albeit in a wholeheartedly commercial package €-- of chimpanzee hunting parties, warfare, tool use, imitative learning, social hierarchies, and the complexity of their culture. The aggressiveness of adult male chimps on display here is probably helpful in the attempt to get the word out that chimps do not make good pets. Moreover, the clear impact of the loss of his mother on Oscar can help build abhorrence against chimps being taken from their mothers -- as we have so callously done for our own purposes. Tim Allen'€™s slangy and jokey narration is sometimes annoying, and the film is no March of the Penguins, but it works fine as a traditional Disney nature doc.

Creation   (2009)
Directed by Jon Amiel; with Paul Bettany, Jennifer Connelly, Benedict Cumberbatch, Jeremy Northam, Toby Jones, and Bill Paterson

Creation is an intriguing, literate, and pointedly well-acted slice of domestic life at Down House, the estate where Charles Darwin (Paul Bettany) lived with his wife Emma (Jennifer Connelly) and their household of children. The fact that Charles'€™ radical theory threatens to turn Victorian religion upside-down, while Mrs. Darwin is a devout and traditional Christian worried for his soul, brings pretty high stakes to the marital conflict. And things get even more complicated between them when the Darwins'€™ 10-year old daughter Annie dies of illness;  the screenplay was adapted from the non-fiction book Annie's Box by the conservationist and great-great-grandson of Darwin, Randal Keynes. It focuses on Darwin's relationship with his favorite child, and how he and Emma interpret her death. A punishment for hubris? The result of over-reliance on science? (Darwin is convinced Annie'€™s scarlet fever should be treated by strong doses of a new Victorian discovery, the '€˜water cure'€™. This keeps her damp and shivering almost constantly.)

Director Jon Amiel surrounds the biographical scenes of Charles'€™ personal and family life with an expansive philosophical questioning: he lets it be disturbing that nature is cruel, that animals in the wild are constantly preyed on by other animals; he doesn'€™t exclude the existential "Well, what'€™s the meaning of life then?" angst provoked by a theory of randomness behind creation.

At the same time, the act of "creation"€ in the title also refers to the process by which Darwin arrives at his big idea, and like some other films about geniuses, it is exciting for that reason alone. And one scene in particular shows that the film'€™s heart is in the right place: Darwin spends an afternoon at the London Zoo in a room with a baby orangutan, taking notes. (The visit really happened in 1838.) Amiel has the good sense just to turn the camera on a baby orang playing with Bettany and leave the two of them alone; the infant'€™s natural curiosity and playfulness shows much greater intelligence and human-like emotion than a trained ape performing tricks could do. (I'€™m pretty sure that films like the Clint Eastwood-orangutan buddy picture Every Which Way But Loose never wanted us to be impressed by ape intellect anyway: as the Canadian scientist and broadcaster David Suzuki pointed out many years ago, the purpose of animals clowning in circuses and the like is actually to make us feel superior to them; the charade, the artificiality of their behavior, is part of the message.)

Though it was released on the 200th anniversary of Darwin'€™s birth, Creation doesn'€™t feel like a definitive drama about the amateur scientist. As the late Roger Ebert wrote: Darwin and the Mrs. don'€™t "€œfully debate their differences...The filmmaker, Jon Amiel, obviously has great respect and affection for the scientist--for them both, really... [But] Creation dares not state relevant ideas that were acceptable nearly 50 years ago, when Inherit the Wind was nominated for four Academy Awards."€

As relatively innocuous as Creation is, the film's producer had a great deal of trouble finding a U.S. distributor for this chamber piece -- every other country in the world signed up first, but the U.S. shied away. Evolution, the bane of the American religious right, is the reason. As he complained to the London Telegraph: "It is unbelievable to us that this is still a really hot potato in America."

Ebert worried that Amiel restrained himself from fashioning a more powerful film "€œin fear of provoking controversy."  Ebert'€™s irate question lingers on: "œHas it gotten to that point?"€ Perhaps the best reason to take a look at Creation is that it can piss off the creationists.