In 2016, the Cincinnati Zoo had a horrible tragedy where a child somehow got into the gorilla exhibit, irritating Harambe, a male silverback. Fearing for the life of the child, zoo authorities fatally shot Harambe, and there was the resulting expected flurry of memes and impassioned discourse.
I don’t have an opinion as to whether or not the facility took the right approach to the unprecedent situation, but I wonder what the great many who expressed such righteous fury would have wanted somebody to do should they happen to find themselves face-to-face with one of these enormous beasts. I very much doubt they would react as Dian Fossey would have.
Actually, her first response to a charging male gorilla was the wrong one, if what is shown in 1988’s Gorillas in the Mist is true, as she ran for her life. Having survived that encounter, she quickly learns the best reaction is to stay in place, hunker down and make oneself as submissive as possible. Pretending to eat some leaves also helps.
This is in 1966, and Fossey is the first person to really live with these primates in this manner. What I find intriguing is how her experience prior to this would not strongly position her as the best candidate for Louis Leakey’s census of highly endangered mountain gorillas. Her justification is she a physical therapist who works predominately with handicapped children, so she’s used to working with those who don’t want others to get too close to them.
Apparently, that’s as good a reason as any, so she arrives in Africa where Leakey has her select a tracker, shows her the route on a rather vague map and gives her a laughably brief tutorial on how to drive the all-terrain truck. Then he gets on the same plane she had disembarked and flies away. That feels like a setup for a Python skit and that alone has me suspecting this may be one of the times the movie comes closest to reality. From some of the first-hand stories I’ve heard about other scientists, they tend to be the kind of people who surprisingly spend so much time just “winging it”.
Alas, many other moments in the film feel creaky. I couldn’t help but notice Sigourney Weaver, as Fosse, gets off that plane in a white jacket that is somehow still immaculate after milling about in a town whose chief product appears to be dirt. At the end of the first day’s hike up the mountain, the only sign of exertion is a smudge of dirt on her left cheek. So far, we’re the level of believability of Deborah Kerr’s impossibly perfect coiffure in King Solomon’s Mines.
Fortunately, the picture finds its footing in the scenes with Weaver and the subjects of her study. The joy and wonder she expresses is palpable. That we see what appear to be real gorillas around her (or, more likely, a stand-in) is astonishing. I was honestly not sure in many scenes whether I was seeing the Rick Baker’s costume work or the genuine article. There were only a couple of missteps with the gorilla effects, particularly a baby one with a face that occupies a similar place in the uncanny valley as E.T.
That baby is liberated by Fossey from the clutches of a man who provides specimens for zoos (Alexandrov Konstantin). In addition to battling against those who are taking the gorillas alive, she’s waged war on poachers who are paid handsomely for the heads and hands of the creatures. I challenge anybody to remain unmoved by the moment she finds the corpse of a male that has had those parts removed.
Alas, there are still other moments in the runtime which feel like cinema cliches, whether or not these occurred in real life. A romantic element feels shoehorned in, when she falls for a National Geographic photographer played by Bryan Brown. Weaver and Brown give it their best, but I wasn’t sold on it. What is interesting is a line of his where he tells her he wants to have sex with her on her 64th birthday.
Spoiler alert: that doesn’t happen, as she was murdered when she was 53 years old. The assailants are still unknown to this day, but there are no shortage of suspects given the poachers, trappers, rebels, locals and government officials she infuriated.
Gorillas in the Mist is good, but not even very good. Even given its subject matter, it is excessively earnest. I don’t know enough about Fossey to know what is fact or not, but almost every development feels like a contrivance. The movie ended without me feeling I really knew anything new about a famous person I didn’t know much about going in. But I know one thing: Fossey wouldn’t have simply vented self-righteous fury all over the internet in the wake of Harambe’s death. I’m sure she would have actually done something.
Dir: Michael Apted
Starring Sigourney Weaver, Bryan Brown
Watched on Mill Creek blu-ray (which really could have used a commentary or supplemental feature about the effects)