In 2008, Man on Wire became a surprising documentary hit. Neither heavy-handed nor controversial—at least not in a fat-guy-holding-a-bullhorn-outside-of-a-government-building kind of way—director James Marsh’s re-telling of Philippe Petit’s improbable high-wire walk between the Twin Towers on a foggy 1974 morning succeeded on the deftness of its storytelling and Petit’s childlike charisma, earning widespread critical praise and becoming one of the year’s few docs to achieve mainstream success. Marsh’s latest, Project Nim, chronicles the life of a chimp (Nim Chimpsky, to be exact) raised to live with humans and communicate through sign language as part of a controversial Columbia University study during the 1970s. Like Wire, Nim is a sharp, subtle drama, and while it lacks any characters as effortlessly charming as Petit, Marsh skillfully explores the ethical trickiness of experimenting on animals, particularly the ones we share 98% of our DNA with.
Nim shares several stylistic similarities with Wire. Marsh gradually introduces a cast of major players to recount the story while relying on archival footage and using reenactments to fill in gaps. But while Marsh crafted Wire as a heist, Nim is plotted like a gritty family drama: a baby chimp is taken from his birth mother and sent to live with a family near New York City, but eventually ends up in the care of a series of well-intentioned but flawed human caretakers. The first, a hippy-dippy type named Stephanie, lets Nim smoke pot, drink alcohol and breastfeed from her before she’s ultimately stripped of her “mother” role (“It was the ‘70s,” notes her daughter). Later, after the experiment has ended and Nim has grown too strong to safely co-habitate with humans, he’s rescued from a life as a vaccine test subject by a shelter for battered animals—but left in isolation, becomes agitated and violent.
If there’s a villain, it’s the project’s leader, Professor Herbert S. Terrace, who comes across alternately as a lousy person and scientist. He seems to bed every coed within arms length, is a bit too eager to line up for photo ops, and frequently misjudges the abilities of his assistants (his decision to choose Stephanie as a caretaker is particularly curious considering she seems to know nothing about chimps or sign language). He ultimately calls off the experiment after Nim begins to leave scars on his assistants, instead of cuts and bruises.
By the experiment’s end, Nim picks up over one hundred signs and even learns to string a few together, but it’s ultimately up for debate whether he’s learned to communicate his thoughts to humans, or simply been trained as a sophisticated beggar. The success of the movie, however, doesn’t hinge on the ambiguous results of the project. Marsh delivers the story with detail and compassion, but never wastes much time promoting an agenda, leaving the viewer to decide whether Project Nim was worth the effort—although I could probably tell you where Nim might stand.
Words by Adam D’Arpino