The devilishly talented British director James Marsh made "Man on Wire," a marvelous documentary blending archival footage and sly reenactments about the French wire-walker who, in 1974, stunned the world by inching his way across a metal strand illegally strung between the unfinished towers of the World Trade Center.
Now Marsh brings us "Project Nim," another improbable true story of '70s-era impudence and risky business. In 1973, Columbia University behavioral psychology professor Herb Terrace launched a study in which a chimpanzee born in a Oklahoma primate research lab became an honorary human raised in most unusual circumstances. Terrace set out to determine if the chimp, taken from his birth mother before he knew what hit him, could be surrounded by surrogate family members and observers, overseen from a distance by Prof. Terrace, and taught to communicate via sign language. By age 5 Nim developed a vocabulary of 120 words, his favorites including "play," "hug," "eat" and "Herb."Heartwarming? Not really. "Project Nim" casts a coolly skeptical eye on Nim's human overseers, some of whom were lucky to get through the research project alive. The chimp's first human home belonged to Stephanie LaFarge, whose blithely undisciplined approach to parenting (both human and simian) led to what one observer called "utter chaos." As LaFarge's daughter Jenny Lee says on camera, with a shrug: "It was the '70s."
We learn that both LaFarge and Nim's second surrogate mother, Laura-Ann Petitto, had relationships of one kind or another with Terrace. Terrace's "strong personal feelings" for Petitto never "got in the way of our science," he says, though inescapably, "Project Nim" draws parallels between the behavior and power struggles as exemplified by Nim, and those going on among his adoptive humans.
Nim, in the words of Terrace, was less a masterly student of signing than a "brilliant beggar" who learned to play his overseers like fiddles, first living in LaFarge's Upper West Side Manhattan brownstone, then in a Riverdale mansion owned by Columbia University — and then, grimly, back at the sketchy, prison-like Oklahoma research facility where he was born. There is a happy ending of sorts, though "Project Nim" tells a sad story guaranteed to stir animal-rights and anti-cruelty sentiments all across the political spectrum. At the same time, director Marsh (who recently made one of the "Red Riding" trilogy dramas) refuses to sentimentalize Nim, whose unpredictable aggression leads to more than one near-death experience for his handlers.
The film's artful re-creations are a touch fuzzy here and there, so that you don't always know if you're looking at "real" footage or fake. (I don't recall any such blurring, deliberate or unintended, with "Man on Wire.") At times the snark recalls a second-shelf "This American Life" installment. But "Project Nim" is practically irresistible. The story keeps getting odder and richer and more complicated. One transgression further, and it all could've ended up like Werner Herzog's "Grizzly Man" — a cautionary tale of the limits of interspecies friendship.
"Project Nim"
Grade: 3 1/2 out of 4 stars
Genres: Documentary
Running Time: 93 min
MPAA Rating: PG-13
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