Project Nim
Composite Score: 81.77
Featuring: Nim Chimpsky, Stephanie LaFarge, Herbert Terrace, Laura-Ann Petito, Bill Tynan, Joyce Butler, Bob Ingersoll, and Chris Byrne
Director: James Marsh
Writer: Elizabeth Hess
Genres: Documentary, Biography
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some strong language, drug content, thematic elements, and disturbing images
Box Office: $612,839 worldwide
Why should you Watch This Film?
Project Nim is a documentary chronicling the life of Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee in the 1970s who was raised as a human by a group of researchers attempting to prove a connection between upbringing and linguistics (or something along those lines, it’s a little vague about the overall goals). The documentary crafts a story about the life of this chimp as if it were the life of a human, matching the methods of the researchers in a highly ironic sense, as it seeks not to justify their actions but, for the most part, to vilify them. In that way, the film succeeds, bringing frustration and anger toward the humans involved in essentially ruining this animal’s life for a failed research experiment. While it frustrates, it also encourages the audience to action, as many successful documentaries do, pushing the audience to do something about such studies and, at the same time, to examine our own treatment of one another in the process.
Why shouldn’t you Watch This Film?
There is no real happy or uplifting ending here. If you want to see Nim rescued or released from captivity, that doesn’t ever really come. While this is true to life and an essential part of the film’s implicit call to action, it does not leave the viewers with anything close to a sense of satisfaction. At its heart, Project Nim is a tragic biography, tracing the life of this ape as everyone around him gives up on him for doing exactly what they should have predicted that he would do. While the film is highly accusatory of the perpetrators, there has clearly been no action taken against anyone involved, as all of them seemingly still have jobs in the fields they describe in the film. In this way, the film creates even more frustration because everything that was done was completely legal and within the bounds of “science” or whatever. In this way, the film fails somewhat to call such practices into question because, aside from some (very little) guilt on the part of some (very few) of the people involved, there is no real consequence, meaning that such things can still be carried out. Justice is not served, and most likely never will be.
So wait, why should you Watch This Film?
What Nim does well is getting the audience to buy in to its premise, namely, that this chimpanzee could potentially have been raised in such a way that he could have succeeded and also that basically every human involved in Nim’s life failed at every step of the way to do so. Eventually, the film also brings a turn: Having bought the audience in to the experiment’s premise, they then show just how ridiculous and flawed it truly is, both through the failure of the experiment and through showing Nim’s living conditions after his time in the experiment. Not only is it bad science, such experimentation is highly unethical as well. In this way, the documentary successfully brings its true call to arms forward, challenging its viewers to shift the ways that they view animals, animal testing, and scientific experimentation. Project Nim works well as a documentary that challenges some preconceived notions of good science and our interactions with other animals by presenting not a positive story of improvement but one of farcical tragedy about humanity’s failure to understand our own nature and that of animals. The film has certainly earned its place among the all-time greats as a unique documentary that is worth watching even without the satisfaction of justice being done or consequences being brought.
