Project Nim

   Project Nim is a documentary about a chimpanzee named Nim, who was taken from his mother as an infant and raised as a human child by a Manhattan family in the 1970s.  This controversial experiment was designed to see if chimps were able to learn to use sign language to communicate with human beings.  This film, which was directed by James Marsh (Man on Wire), introduces you to a host of caretakers over a span of more than two decades.  Herb Terrace is the scientist who initiated the experiment and he is, like so many of the other people involved throughout the story, at times quite likeable and at other times fiercely loathsome.  The beauty of this documentary, which was one of the things I liked so much about the Oscar-winning Man on Wire, is that Marsh merely presents the facts of the case and lets us decide who is good and who is bad.  More importantly, he lets us decide if Nim is the beneficiary or the victim.  During a large part of the film, an argument can be made in either corner.  At the end, it is a bit easier to determine what to think about it all when we hear testimony from Terrace himself about how he believes Nim was nothing more than a cunning and clever chimp who merely mimicked the signs he saw from his handlers simply to get treats.  Terrace did not dispute that Nim knew a few signs, like hug and play, but he felt that it was not enough to conclude that Nim knew the language.  I suppose it is like when a dog responds to the phrase "roll over" because it knows it will be rewarded if it does so.  Terrace argued that Nim's behavior simply fell under the model of operant conditioning rather than a significant grasp of language as we understand it.
  As Nim is transferred from one set of caretakers to another to another, he becomes increasingly defiant and his tendency towards acting violently increases with each new 'owner.'  I couldn't help but think about the products of poor and/or inconsistent parenting that I witness every day in the classroom.  Nearly 100% of a child's behavior, whether it is good or bad, is a direct result of parenting.  The correlation is as clear with Nim as it is with school children. 
   I recently heard a James Solomon interview with Rise of the Planet of the Apes director Rupert Wyatt where he talked about how his fictional story was so closely connected to Project Nim.  Wyatt confirmed that his writers were very familiar with the story of Nim and said that the chimp protagonist Caesar was indeed modeled after Nim (and also Oliver, a 'missing-link humanzee' who was discovered by scientists in Africa in the 1960s and brought to America for testing and public exhibition).  In a separate Solomon interview with James Marsh, the Nim director similarly confirmed the connection between the two films and expressed excitement about being mentioned together as a pair. 
  Project Nim was both a zoological and sociological experiment that failed miserably, while Project Nim is both a fascinating and tragic bio-pic documentary that succeeds triumphantly.

(I would recommend seeing Nim and Rise together)