| 1 | | In late November 1973, a young woman |  |
| | from New York went to Oklahoma to adopt |
| | the newest and youngest member of her |
| | family. It wasn’t a human baby she was |
| | bringing home to Manhattan, however, but |
| | rather a 2-week-old chimpanzee, destined |
| | to be part of an audacious project to see if |
| | a member of another species could be |
| | taught to communicate with humans. The |
| | unforeseen ways that notion played out |
| | over the next two dozen years is the subject of James Marsh’s unsettling “Project |
| | Nim”. What happened between that chimp and the humans with whom he spent |
| | his life in intimate contact turns out to be only half the story that Marsh has to tell. |
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| 2 | | Marsh is a superb interviewer, and the key participants in Nim’s story are far |
| | enough removed in time to be candid about what happened but not so far away |
| | to have forgotten the details. 17 he has a weakness for occasional |
| | unsatisfactory dramatizations, Marsh also makes excellent use of the large |
| | amount of still and movie footage shot then that shows us exactly what Nim and |
| | his human hosts were up to. |
| 3 | | It was Columbia University behavioral psychologist Herbert Terrace who |
| | came up with the idea of placing a chimp in a human family to see if it could be |
| | taught American Sign Language. Stephanie LaFarge, one of Terrace’s former |
| | graduate students, was Nim’s original surrogate mother. She had recently |
| | remarried, and her blended family of seven children lived in an apartment in New |
| | York that became Nim’s new home. If you’re thinking this was a group decision, |
| | you would be wrong. “There was no discussion, it just happened,” remembers |
| | Jenny Lee, LaFarge’s daughter. And her mother, who admits she “liked the |
| | freedom to defy expectations and authority,” makes no bones about the fact that |
| | “my appetite and drive to have an intimate relationship with an animal was |
| | unstoppable.” |
| 4 | | Not surprisingly, this drive ran into some real-world problems. For one thing, |
| | LaFarge was not prepared for what she calls “the wild animal in Nim,” and |
| | LaFarge’s husband didn’t expect the outright hostility from a chimp genetically |
| | inclined to 19 male authority figures. |
| 5 | | All of this was intensified by growing conflicts between Terrace, who |
| | consistently comes off as cold and arrogant, and Earth mother-type LaFarge, |
| | who’d once been his lover. Unhappy with what he considered a lack of order, |
| | Terrace gave increasing organizational authority to a bright, highly motivated |
| | (and, not surprisingly, quite attractive) 18-year-old student named Laura-Ann |
| | Petitto. The philosophical differences between her and LaFarge were so intense |
| | that the distaste each one feels for the other is undiminished to this day. |
| 6 | | While even these few events are emotional enough to bring a scientific drama |
| | to a boil, more was in store for Nim, much more. There was significant turnover in |
| | caregivers, multiple changes of location, even radical alterations in Terrace’s |
| | thinking about whether chimps could in fact be taught to learn language in any |
| | meaningful way. Trapped in a world he never made, a no-man’s land between |
| | species, Nim did the best he could, and even doing that much turned out to be |
| | difficult. |
| | Looking back on Nim now, LaFarge feels “we had done so much damage |
| | removing him from what his life should have been, it was wrong.” Speaking even |
| | more strongly is Joyce Butler, one of his signing teachers. “We did a huge |
| | disservice to him and his soul, and shame on us,” she says, just about in tears, |
| | and seeing this eye-opening film makes it impossible to argue the point. No |
| | wonder it won the best directing award for world documentary at Sundance. |
