Sigourney Weaver, Gorillas in the Mist

Friday, April 08, 2005

Pauline Kael

“As the anthropologist Dian Fossey . . ., Sigourney Weaver storms into a large hotel restaurant in central Africa, stalks the length of the room, delivers a strident tongue-lashing to a Dutch zoo broker who's having lunch with his friends, and, cursing loudly, makes her exit--all the while carrying a good-sized baby gorilla in her arms, holding it tenderly, with awe. Weaver's phystical strength alone is inspiring in this move, and there's a new freedom in her acting. She's so vivid that you immediately feel Dian Fossey's will and drive. Weaver's Dian is ecstatic when she steps off the plane in Afreica, and she's enraptured when she's perched high up on a mountain, crouched down opposite a giant gorilla, mimicking his language and gestrues from the inside--trying to think the way he does. Weaver is something to see. What happens between her and the animals is really happening (or, at least, appears to be), and there's joy in it. It makes everything else--all the acted-out passion and heroism and melodramea of Dian Fossey's eighteen years on her mountain--seem tired.Error! Reference source not found.

. . . . [W]e never see Dian learn much of anything about primates or about our origins. Instead, we see her arrive in Africa, form an emotional attachment to a gorilla family, and cut herself off more and more from people, until she's a fiercely maternal harridan who can't work with anyone. By then, Weaver's jaw juts out stubbornly; in her mania, Dian becomes apelike. Yet when she thinks of happy times with her favorites, her face is transformed. She blooms. Weaver acts the way she's built--she's monumental.

. . . Michael Apted . . . and . . . Anna Hamilton Phelan . . . probably want us to be inspired by Dian Fossey as an activist heroine--a woman who made a difference. . . . But they didn't find a way to fit this inspirational idea into their account of Dian Fossey's becoming convinced that she was the only one who knew how to protect the gorillas, and operating like a half-crazed terrorist. (In her later years, she probably damaged her cause.) . . . .

Pauline Kael
date?
Movie Love, pp 5-6

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