Project Nim

By The Week Staff

last updated 8 January 2015

Directed by James Marsh

(PG-13)

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Ever wonder what would happen if you took a baby chimp from his mother and had him raised by Upper West Side hippies? said Kyle Smith in the New York Post. Not only does this “deep, disturbing, and funny” documentary answer that question, it offers a fascinating study of human arrogance. The story begins in 1973, when Columbia University psychologist Herb Terrace decides to teach a chimp named Nim sign language to see if the animal can also learn grammar. Things start out charmingly enough, as Nim seems to take to his surrogates’ libertine ways, said Scott Tobias in the A.V. Club. But when Terrace concludes that the experiment is off-track, the chimp is shuttled first to a “lush estate run like a commune” and then to “a hellish laboratory for medical experiments.” Oscar-winning director James Marsh lays out his period drama using a “meticulous blend of archival footage, talking-head interviews, and artful reconstructions,” said Andrew O’Hehir in Salon.com. The result is a “darkly hilarious social portrait of the bizarre alternate universe of 1970s academia.” It’s also an “extraordinary biography” of one unlucky chimp.