David Edelstein

Gorillas in the Mist is a banalized bio-pic, but it does give Sigourney Weaver a role of some stature, intelligence, and wigginess--and Weaver is a big, smart, wiggy performer, long in search of the right part. She used to think too much on screen: She could seem guarded, noncommital, as if she were harboring some private joke or resentment. Thinking isn't a barrier to great acting, but you have to think in character; Weaver's peculiar blend of goofiness and anger set her apart from the people she played. (She seemed squirmy about her beauty, too, as if afraid it would misrepresent her.) But Weaver is going for broke these days. A new fearlessness has entered her acting--she'll inhabit a part if it kills her. In roles that require steeliness, obseesion, and a thin skin, she has flourished, and she has held on to her sense of absurdity; she isn't afraid to look foolish. As Dian Fossey, she is magnificent. . . .

Gorillas in the Mist views Dian Fossey as a ferocious saint, martyr, and mad-woman, a sort of Joan of Apes. . . . Weaver gets deep inside Fossey's obsession--her fury becomes contagious.

She's in a rage from the start, hammering on Dr. Leakey . . . for a job . . . We don't know why gorillas are thing (the movie doesn't tell you that she's wanted to do this all her life and had already been to Africa), but we sense that this isn't just another strident broad--there's something primal in her bitchiness. The problem is that we're not allowed to watch her work. . . . Apted isn't interested in process--he want results fast. But process is the essence of Fossey's story. The suspense in documentaries of Jane Goodall's life among baboons comes from how she teaches them to trust her, creeping a little closer to them every day; but Gorillas in the Mist glides right over the essential moments, the minutiae. . . .

. . . . [T]o ram the injustice . . . home, there are plenty of sequences in which baby gorillas frolic (to nauseating [?] music) and Weaver grins her wide, little-girl grin.

Weaver's acting is frolicsome, too, and she's more fun to watch than the apes. To make the gorillas comfortable with her, she tries to adopt their mannerisms; watching her lope, scratch, and screech, you sense what makes her special as an actress--she's game for anything. Fossey and Weaver converge here: This could be how Weaver trains for a part. Eventually, Fossey's identification with the gorillas becomes total. . . . Weaver's visage even grows more apelike--the jaw becomes fuller, lumpier. [According to Denby, Weaver used dental templates.] More important, she's thinking like a gorilla. She adopts their mannerisms because they make sense to her--they're the most efficient way to express her rage. (It's lucky that the filmmakers didn't cast a more technically flamboyant actress, because then the metamorphosis might seem a joke.)

Fossey actually went much further than Weaver does here . . . . [The movie] trivializes her achievements (she was an accomplished writer as well as a bitch), and then it trivializes her mental illness. The film goes to great lengths to suggest that for Fossey, Digit is almost a lover--she is submissive to him as to no one else, coquettish, lying supine, her hand outstretched to touch his. She reacts to his murder as an infuriated spouse . . . .

There's something crude about all this--she's Miss Lonelyapes--and yet Weaver pulls it off. It's never a dirty joke about a woman's big-ape fantasies--her expression suggests rapture, and the apes, with their squarish heads and enormous stature, seem worthy of it. The performance has elements of an epiphany--literally, a transformation of a human being into something different. [Sure, we're different from, but how different are we from gorillas?] Those who think of acting as a religion will come away shaken, blessed.

David Edelstein
Village Voice, October 4, 1988
[A religion, now? My.]