James Marsh’s ‘Project Nim’ goes for the humor in a strange situation
On the surface, the story of Project Nim, the new film from director James Marsh (Man on Wire), resembles fiction rather than non-fiction. It’s late 1973, and a chimpanzee born in a prison-like research facility is shipped to New York to live with a family as part of a controversial and bizarre behavioral experiment. Herbert Terrace, a psychologist at Columbia University and mastermind of the proceedings, enlists one of his former students—now married with children—to be the surrogate mother to the chimp. The impetus was to show that the chimpanzee, raised naturally as part of a human family, could learn to communicate with language. It was a bold attempt to succeed where others had failed. In a brazen move, Terrace named the chimp Nim Chimpsky, a dig at the linguist Noam Chomsky and the academic establishment that decried the experiment before it even began.
It didn’t go exactly as planned. As everyone quickly realized, Nim was a troublemaker, though a lovable one with equal propensity to cuddle and smash valuable household items. As he was moved from one family to another, and as a revolving door of research assistants moved in and out, Nim grew more attached and more angry at the same time, developing a nasty habit of wanting to chew the faces off his friends. Intelligent researchers were shocked to find that a chimpanzee, even while wearing a cute pint sized sweater, could develop such animalistic tendencies. He was quickly shipped away, but not without a fight.
The film is a swifter, more nuanced cinematic adaptation of Elizabeth Hess’ non-fiction account Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human. The book stakes a firm moral position in the battle ground of animal rights, coming down brisk and hard against the experiment. (The book’s extremely clear introductory salvo: “Chimpanzees were never meant to be born, or live, in captivity.”) Project Nim avoids snap judgments and righteous generalizations: the focus is on what happened instead of what should have happened, never presenting heroes or villains, although some appear more qualified for the position than others.
“That’s probably a distinction I was aware of making the film,” Marsh explained during a recent conversation. “I don’t know; I wouldn’t want to speak for Elizabeth, but clearly she was more familiar with the world of animal rights and animal culture then I am. What I wanted to do was try to tell the story in a more neutral kind of way.”
Emotions run rampant, and the story of Nim means many things to many people. Everyone has their side of the story, most detailing what they did right and others did wrong. Nobody can step back and see themselves as part of the problem. What’s clear across the board is how much of a personal connection the animal made on the lives involved; the film deals more in tears and anger, little in facts and figures and data.
“You can potentially fault the film for its lack of scientific rigor interest,” Marsh noted, “but I was personally more interested in the behavior aspects of all this. And what we would find out about ourselves in the context of this animal. What behavior he fleshes out in us.”
Much of the behavior in Project Nim is funny, sometimes bordering on the ridiculous. Nim occasionally smokes pot, and is cared for by a series of sexually intertwined research assistants, down on their knees for the father-figure Terrace. The whole scene is heady, leftovers from the Age of Aquarius. At times, it’s hard to believe any of these people could take care of themselves, let alone a wild animal.
“It’s a comic idea, ultimately,” Marsh said. “Bedtime for Bonzo, the Ronald Regan film, which I saw again in relation to this, did something similar. It’s a scientist who makes friends with a chimpanzee and lives in a house with him. So clearly you can’t be puritanical about this stuff—it’s funny. It’s comic, you know? Comedy is built on misunderstanding and here we have a misunderstanding between two different species. That’s a pretty broad gulf that you’re dealing with.”
The tone never veers toward irreverence, countering the comedic utterances with a highly formed style resembling a thriller instead of a fly-on-the-wall documentary. Dramatic lighting and subjective camera movements are part of a larger mosaic that includes standard talking-head interviews, rediscovered footage from the period, and recreated scenes staged for the film. Marsh is a filmmaker who moves casually between fiction and non-fiction—he directed a piece of the Red Riding Trilogy, and is currently shooting a thriller starring Clive Owen—and uses the techniques of both to great effect.
The end result is something much stronger. Before making the film, one of the questions Marsh said he asked himself was: “Can you make a biography of an animal?” The answer is a resounding yes: one which is funny, tragic, and ultimately human.
Project Nim opens July 8 at Angelika Film Center and Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center at Lincoln Center
