Do you remember the chimp that they tried to teach sign language to? Well now he has a movie! Project Nim is the grueling story of Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee that was taken from his mother at a very early age to be raised as a human. Like many documentaries, if you’re not interested in the subject matter, you probably won’t be interested in the movie but Project Nim does a great job exposing the inner workings of this story to everyday moviegoers. You’ll quickly grow attached to this little monkey and feel his pain. If you’re familiar with the story, you’ll love the archival video and interviews that this doc supplies. If you have no idea about this brilliant chimp, you’ll get to learn an amazing tale in the nature vs nurture debate. Don’t worry, the movie doesn’t try to impose its beliefs on you…in fact, it’s the most bipartisan? documentary I’ve seen all year.
The movie begins at the beginning of Nim’s life. Nim is with his mother in Oklahoma until he’s quickly snatched by a former student of Columbia University and taken to live in New York. Could you imagine raising a chimpanzee as a member of your own family? Stephanie had no qualms about it and didn’t even discuss it with her family. She knew nothing about chimps but when asked by her former professor to participate in this experiment, she knew she wanted that intimate relationship with an animal. Her family just went along with it…”it was the 70s!” You can quickly tell that the cast of this documentary were straight up hippies. To illustrate the extent that Stephanie took this role of raising her newborn chimp: she breast fed the monkey for months. She’s a very free spirit and it shows in her interviews.
Baby Nim
The documentary goes through the timeline of Nim. It raises a lot of questions for debate like, “What was the right way to raise a chimpanzee as a human?”, “Is this even scientific?”, “How do you know if a monkey is actually learning?” etc. Enter Laura: an attractive 18 year-old student who decided she knew how to teach Nim the best. The movie quickly changed from watching a cute chimp play around with humans to a more structured scientific experiment. You would think the movie would get stale at this point but because of the constant revolving doors of characters in Nim’s upbringing, the movie stayed fresh. You got to know the man behind this whole study: Herbert Terrace. Herb is a sleazy college professor who slept with most of the females involved with the project. He kept reiterating that the sexual interactions had nothing to do with anything…
Nim and Laura signing
From Stephanie to Laura to Herb and others, the people around Nim and the stories they had are the true heart of this documentary. Sure Nim had a rough life, but it wouldn’t be very entertaining to chronologically go through his predicaments, they’ve done that on news shows already…Nim was already a star. This documentary, Project Nim, is more like a behind the scenes special allowing you closer into what was actually happening. You get to learn that Nim liked alcohol and pot and other sensations that Nim’s caretakers also enjoyed. Nim would even sign, “Stone Smoke Now.” Chimpanzees are a very intelligent and social creature so it’s remarkable to see how he interacted in various situations.
Nim with sleazy professor Herb...they kind of look like Curious George and The Man with the Yellow Hat
If you’re even a little curious about a real monkey in the real world, check out Project Nim. If not, you’d probably walk out of the movie within the first 10 minutes like a couple did in my screening (to see if you’d stay, the first 6 minutes of the movie are embedded below!). If you stay until the end, you’re guaranteed to learn a lot. You’ll be baffled by the people involved with the chimp, angered at how he’s treated at times and fall in love with Nim himself. You’ll go back and forth trying to figure out if Nim actually learned, if he was bounded by nature or nurture or if experiments like this should even be allowed. The movie allows you to think rather than tells you what to think and therefore did it’s job wonderfully. This is how documentaries should be presented and information shared.
Tags: Project Nim
Matthew Fong created advancescreenings.com and is the lead contributor. He watches every type of movie and will try almost anything twice. You can follow him on twitter here: @matthewfong
