In 1973, an Upper West Side mom brought home a chimp and added it to the brood of seven kids she was raising with her husband in a groovy clan of trust-fund hippies. What could go wrong?
Brilliant, provocative, clear of eye and heavy of heart, the documentary “Project Nim” answers that question while raising many other fascinating ones about nature versus nurture, arrogance and, more broadly, the mythmaking that beclouds the progressive mindset.
Nim Chimpsky — the play on Noam Chomsky, unacknowledged in this film, is a rebuke to the MIT linguist’s theory that language is for humans only — was ripped from his mom at a primate preserve in Oklahoma when he was just weeks old, and sent to New York City for a linguistics experiment.
Columbia professor Herb Terrace wondered whether a chimp raised among humans who communicated with it in sign language — chimps lack the physical capacity to talk — could learn grammar. He sent Nim off to live with Stephanie and W.E.R. LaFarge, a couple raising seven kids in an Upper West Side brownstone. Stephanie thought it natural to start breastfeeding the beast.
Whoa. And many more startling moments are coming.
The family taught Nim some sign language, but the tutelage arrow flipped around quickly. W.E.R., a ponytailed poet, discovered that he could either assert his dominance in the new family or accept Nim as the alpha male. Stephanie found Nim rooting around between her legs and around her breasts.
“He was bringing out something in me — a freedom to defy expectations and authority,” recalls Stephanie. Says her daughter with a laugh, “It was the ’70s.”
The implications of housing a wild animal at 78th and Amsterdam — one stronger than a grown man and equipped with fangs — eluded everyone. But Nim did learn to sign and understand scores of words, if not grammatical structure.
In the early scenes, the thrill of conversing with a member of another species — the toppling of this Berlin Wall between man and beast — is palpable. Then Mother Nature proves a resilient dictator.
Director James Marsh, who won an Oscar for this century’s most sublime documentary, “Man on Wire,” allows the participants to tell the story, albeit with some slightly cheesy “Dateline”-style re-enactments.
Editing is everything in a documentary, though, and attentive viewers will appreciate the density of ideas and the clever selectivity of the interviews. For instance, when Nim is placed with a better sign language teacher, Laura, Stephanie derides her as “a cute little thing from Ramapo.” Sheer jungle stuff: Stephanie had (and the younger, prettier Laura will have) an affair with the alpha Professor Terrace.
“Project Nim” is deep, disturbing and funny: Cue shots of Nim sharing a joint with his shaggy minders, one of whom says caring for the animal beats anything, including maybe a Grateful Dead concert. Nim will go to a leafy estate in the wealthy Riverdale section of The Bronx and to several surprising destinations.
The humans, one of whom pays for her idealism with a chunk of her face bloodily snatched by Nim’s jaws, realize they should never have taken Nim from his mother in the first place. Their hasty effort to rebuild the wall between civilization and the jungle corrects the unfeasible primitivist dream, phrased in the song “Woodstock” as “We’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden,” that’s an enduring feature of posh urban sophisticates.
The word “free” pops up repeatedly in “Project Nim,” usually drifting from the lips of a smiling idealist contemplating nature’s beauty. But the movie is all about costs.
“We did a huge disservice to that soul, and shame on us,” says one of Nim’s admirers. Stephanie, who was nearly killed by Nim, is more direct. Of the experiment, she declares, “It was wrong.” How judgmental, how un-Woodstock of her.