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USA 2011
Directed by
James Marsh
93 minutes
Rated G

Reviewed by
Andrew Lee
4 stars

Project Nim

Synopsis: The story of Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee taken from his mother and raised by humans to test whether a chimp was intelligent enough to construct sentences and communicate.

There’s a line in Project Nim that sticks, an admission that there is such thing as ethical animal experimentation. It comes from a man who ran a primate research lab. He has an honest appraisal of the work he did, it was something necessary to advance science, but he was under no illusions about what he was doing. Sadly, almost everyone else involved in this story seems to think they were engaged in something noble. And to be fair a few of them are quite noble, but they’re the ones trying to look after Nim rather than exploit him.

It’s testament to James Marsh’s abilities as a filmmaker that he could coax out of his subjects so many admissions that make them sound awful, clueless and stupid. And really, starting with the project’s head, Herb Terrace, and his initial assistant, Stephanie LaFarge, a lot of them come out of this as prideful, ignorant, selfish and self-righteous. And stuck in the middle of it all is Nim, the chimp they taught to think he was a person.

The experiment itself was an interesting one. Could a chimp learn the syntax of a language and communicate, create sentences based on knowing the language rather than simple mimicking them? But from the get-go this was a doomed experiment. Herb puts Nim with a former student (and former lover) Stephanie. She has no project plan, no schedule, and no guidance. She just adopts the chimp as one of her family and lets him play. Scientifically speaking, it was a disaster. That she’d rather have him play in the house and smoke pot with them than teach him the sign language essential to the project speaks volumes to how poorly conceived the experiment and its recruitment procedures were. The things she talks about make her sound like a stereotypical nut-job hippie, and you wonder if she wasn’t quietly trying to sabotage the whole experiment for reasons of her own. But then Nim is taken off Stephanie and placed in the care of Herb’s new student, Laura-Ann, who gives Nim’s education some structure. She also becomes Herb’s lover, briefly, so Herb definitely doesn’t come off well in this story. Talk about pattern behaviour…

Then some more people come on board, while Herb is absent much of the time, unless a TV camera is present. And once Nim grows to be too big to handle, having assaulted and nearly killed Laura-Ann and several other staff on the project, he’s dumped back into the animal reserve they took him from. Herb takes his results, such as they are, and concludes that Nim is a “brilliant beggar”, knowing how to ask for what he wants, much like a dog, but unable to consciously construct sentences of any complexity.

But that’s not the end of the story, it’s really only the beginning. What follows is where that line about ethical animal experimentation really comes into play. A chimp who has been raised to think of himself as human is abandoned into a group of chimps. He has no idea how to interact and he has precious little support. So from there he ends up in an animal testing centre, before being “rescued” by people with no idea of how to look after a primate. Everyone has good intentions all the way through, but the impossibility of ethically experimenting on an animal is thrown into sharp relief. Especially one who can tell you he’s miserable and just wants to go home.

Project Nim would make a great double feature with the recent Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes. The two films complement each other nicely, with good intentions gone wrong and a chimp stuck in the middle of things he never asked for. If you ever wondered why there are ethics committees for experiments these days, this is the film for you, and you’ll want to take a baseball bat to some of the people before it’s over. But there are some decent people among the crazies, and there is a happy ending of sorts. But once you realise how haphazard and improvised much of the project was, it’ll leave you wondering how it ever got off the ground in the first place. I still can’t get over the fact that everyone is so open and candid. Evidently to this day they believe they were right in what they did. Go see the film and judge for yourself.

 

 

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