Project Nim is the fascinating and exquisitely executed new documentary by the makers of Man on Wire, Paste’s documentary of the decade.
In Man on Wire, director James Marsh recounted French tightrope walker Philippe Petit’s exploits, most notably his unauthorized 1974 walk between the Twin Towers that held most of the city of New York breathless for an entire morning. In Project Nim, a team of researchers (only one year earlier, in 1973) sets out to accomplish an even more audacious and thrilling goal—to teach a chimpanzee human sign language and initiate meaningful dialogue.
Technically the film is flawless. The story is told largely from the point of view of the participants (all of whom agreed to be interviewed for the film), but because of the high profile nature of the experiment, there’s a lot of archival video footage and photography to keep things from turning too talking-head-heavy. Marsh also makes judicious use of recreations, but anyone who’s seen Man on Wire knows that he handles that technique well; the thrilling and heartbreaking opening scene alone will dispel any worries by anyone else. There’s a running motif of large words sliding across the screen, which bookends and illuminates conversations well, adds a great deal of visual interest, and ties in nicely to the idea of Nim learning sign language (since the titles themselves are a sort of visualization of language). Dickon Hinchliffe (Winter’s Bone) adds a fantastic score that achieves a difficult task—capturing the excitement of the project and its promise while also suggesting a deep foreboding.
But the most compelling aspect of the story told by Project Nim isn’t just the implications for the conversation about animal rights. Nim’s latter-day suffering is heartbreaking, but it’s predominantly due to his being denied the opportunity to grow up as a normal chimpanzee. Nearly no animals face a similar predicament, and nearly everyone would agree that such an animal deserves special treatment rather than being warehoused with others who were able to develop more sophisticated survival and coping skills (or at least more suited to the environment in which they live).
No, the really compelling angle for the film is the very idea of inter-species communication. Decades of science fiction films, notably Spielberg’s milestone Close Encounters of the Third Kind, have long tapped into the primordial power of the question “Are we alone in the universe?” But the experimenters in Project Nim were looking to create a different type of contact with the animals that have been right in front of us all along. It helps, too, that chimpanzees look and act, at times, in ways that are uncannily human.
Unfortunately, Nim Chimpsky, the charismatic subject of the experiment (yes, named for Noam Chomsky), is not in good hands. Marsh doesn’t really comment much, either explicitly or implicitly, on the characters, but most of them damn themselves quite well with their own words. Lead researcher Herbert Terrace displays few, if any, redeeming qualities—he’s arrogant, diffident, self-absorbed and apparently never thinks twice of the chaos his sexual dalliances cause around him. Worst of all, he seems more interested in the celebrity associated with the project than with the project itself; if he’s a father figure to Nim, it’s a largely absent and uncaring father.
Nim’s first surrogate mother (and Terrace’s lover), Stephanie LaFarge, is a trust-fund hippie who clearly thinks of Nim as human and projects her need onto him—she breastfeeds him and talks creepily about her pleasure in his emerging sexual interest in her body. She uses Nim to emasculate her resentful husband (unsurprisingly, her training was in Freudian psychoanalysis). And she resents the project and its influence on Nim, claiming that “words are the enemy” and admitting “Part of me didn’t want him to learn language—he was ‘less’ with language than as his own unique self.”
At one point a more serious researcher, Laura Petitto (who went on to become one of the world’s foremost neurological scientists) joins the project and despite her youth (she’s 18 at the time) provides some much-needed scientific rigor, as well as the (seemingly obvious) perspective that it’s unwise to treat a chimpanzee as if he’s human. Most of the project’s scientific progress happens under her watch, and she’s a breath of fresh air, clearly the heroine of the first act. But inevitably, a sexual encounter with Terrace goes wrong, and even she flees the project. By the time Nim finds a human champion and protector with a realistic view of his nature, the poor chimp is traumatized, confused, and scarred beyond repair.
In the final reckoning, Project Nim is a cautionary tale. While the idea of having meaningful interactions with another species is a noble one, you don’t have to be a PETA activist to see that humans did not do right by Nim Chimpsky. Terrace’s lack of remorse for the chaos he provided is just a sign of a deeper disregard for the consequences of any of his actions, research included. Even “just” an animal deserves to be treated by humans with some basic dignity, and all the more so if we’ve compromised his ability to survive without us. Even a project begun with the best of intentions can go horribly wrong if its participants aren’t dedicated to taking responsibility for their actions. “We made a commitment to him and we failed,” says researcher Joyce Butler in a fitting summation. “Shame on us.”