Project Nim

A version of this review appeared in The Age, October 1, 2011.

What a long, strange trip it turned out to be for Nim Chimpsky, perhaps the most celebrated ape of his day, torn from his mother as an infant in 1973 and parachuted into a wealthy Manhattan family to test the possibility of “animal language acquisition”.

Nim has been the subject of several books – including one by Herbert J. Terrace, the Columbia psychology professor who instigated the study – and his life is chronicled once more in this fascinating, harrowing documentary by James Marsh, the follow-up to his Oscar-winning Man on Wire (2008). That earlier film told the story of Philippe Petit, who made headlines in 1974 by walking between the twin towers of the World Trade Centre. Returning to the same historical moment, Project Nim is likewise concerned with an effort to transcend the bounds of the possible – one that eventually falls back down to earth.

If Man on Wire was modelled after a caper film, the accounts of Nim's childhood suggest a druggy screwball comedy. To care for his protégé and teach him sign language, Terrace drafted his former student (and lover) Stephanie LaFarge, along with her second husband and their combined brood of seven children. In every way, little Nim was treated as a member of the family: breast-fed, toilet trained, plied with beers and joints. (“It was the '70s,” is the catch-all explanation offered by LaFarge's daughter.) Log-books and daily routines were dismissed as overly bourgeois; no-one involved had more than the vaguest grasp of either signing or animal management.

Still, LaFarge's home movies give glimpses of a fanciful idyll: romps in the park, Nim cuddling a kitten. In other respects, the situation was a volatile one, particularly as the rapidly maturing Nim began to compete with LaFarge's husband for the position of dominant male. (There's testimony on all sides to Nim's ability to bring out the “animal” in humans – not least Terrace, who's repeatedly chided for his preening, high-handed behaviour and tendency to surround himself with young female researchers.) Eventually Terrace rejigged the terms of the experiment, shifting Nim to a mansion supplied by the university and bringing him on campus for regular schooling. But after several outbreaks of violence, it was time to call a halt. Nim was sent back to his birthplace at an primate research centre in Oklahoma – and despite his obvious brightness, the final scientific verdict cast doubt on how much he had truly learnt.

The second half of the film shows Nim passing from one group of caretakers to another, in a series of sequences that have the pathos of early Disney (like Pinocchio, he's almost but not quite a real boy). The self-accusations of a vet in a medical laboratory will force almost anyone to think twice about the morality of using animals as test subjects; Marsh also gives us a couple of clearly-identified heroes, notably the radiant Bob Ingersoll, a hippie grad student who befriended Nim in Oklahoma and did his best to help him later on.

Like Werner Herzog, Marsh is more a yarn-spinner than a journalist or historian; like Errol Morris, he makes documentaries that telegraph their “constructed” nature as blatantly as any fiction. Artifice is evident in every aspect of Project Nim, from the use of re-enactments to the lighting of the interviewees, set against a grey, ostensibly neutral studio backdrop. More than an assemblage of facts, the film aspires to the status of a parable, with many potential meanings, not all of them linked directly to animal rights. Arguably Nim's keepers were wrong to try to endow him with human attributes – but how far can we emphasise with his suffering without making the same mistake? Is it possible to communicate with others without viewing them as mirrors of the self? “If a lion could talk,” wrote Wittgenstein, “we could not understand him.”