Republished from the show notes of my other site, Fuds on Film.
This is the tale of occupational therapist turned naturalist Dian Fossey, played by Sigourney Weaver, who moved from Kentucky to the Congo to survey and study endangered mountain gorillas, a six month sojourn that extended to her life’s work.
Arriving in the Congo, she enlists a local tracker, John Omirah Miluwi’s Sembagare to set up a camp and track down the few remaining gorilla families, eventually meeting with success only for the civil war to catch up with her and see them booted out of the Congo. Ultimately she is undeterred and starts again in Rwanda, where she’s able not only to catalog the gorillas but to study and document their behaviour more closely than anyone had previously dared to, including very up close and personal interactions.
It’s not without difficulty, particularly when her efforts to conserve the gorillas and their habitations clash with local poachers, but the profile of her work is raised when National Geographic send photographer Bob Campbell (Bryan Brown) to document her work. The two become lovers, although we’re left with the impression that Dian is married mainly to her work.
It does rather skip quickly through twenty years of dedicated work, during which if the film is to be believed she became rather possessive of the gorillas and the territory, through to her untimely murder in 1985, an ultimately unsolved crime although one with some fairly obvious suspects.
We’re left in no doubt of the remarkable nature of Fossey’s work and character, and Anna Hamilton Phelan’s script and Michael Apted’s direction back up a highly commendable turn from Weaver. The production design is also very accomplished – on a first viewing I certainly couldn’t tell where the real gorillas end and the prosthetics begin, at least without going on to consider the insurance implications of what’s happening on screen.
It is, I suppose, a question raised by every biopic – is the subject’s work or the subject more important, or perhaps just more interesting? I’m not 100% sure the creators hit quite the correct balance here. Certainly it seems to be more focussed on the work for the middle hour and change, and doesn’t quite give as much of an insight into Fossey’s character as I’d prefer. It’s not really all that noticeable until the back stretch, but as she starts throwing around the possessives – my gorillas, my mountain – to, y’know, the people actually native to that country, there’s certainly room for a bit more probing than the film seems to want to get into, just settling back into the earlier established “she’s strong-willed” explanation and showing us some more gorillas.
Which, to be fair, works well enough to make this a worthwhile and worthy watch, and a fitting tribute to a remarkable character. I don’t know if this has had quite the cultural impact it deserves, outside of Ice Cube’s Now I Gotta Wet Cha, but if like me you’ve passed on this until now it’s well worth tracking down.