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With The Cove, the liberal agenda documentary has officially become a subgenre. It can often be overbearing to watch film after film that documents what’s wrong with the world, while telling me that I need to help fix it. Al Gore said I need to save the planet and Food, Inc. advised me to be more cautious in the supermarket. Meanwhile, Michael Moore keeps yelling in my face. Louie Psihoyos, the director and star of The Cove, separates the world into two kinds of people: activists and inactivists. That’s a rather strong and controversial distinction, but Psihoyos has earned the right to be obstinate. His film documents how he organized a group of specialists to film the mass slaughter of dolphins in Taiji, Japan, which is an annual occurrence.

The film’s main protgonist is Ric O’Barry. When we first meet him he appears a little paranoid: a man not to be trusted. He’s wearing a doctor’s mask on his face so as not to be detected by the local authorities in Taiji. From this initial impression, I developed an immediate cynical response to O’Barry as just another crazy left-wing lunatic. Later, when Taiji’s chief of police is tailing O’Barry’s van, my cynicism dissipated. As the film progresses, and we learn who O’Barry is and what he stands for, it becomes evident that O’Barry is brave for even being near Taiji and that his paranoia is justified, and perhaps too mild for his own safety. The trouble is that we don’t get enough of O’Barry. Here is a truly fascinating man. He trained the dolphins for the original Flipper, including his favorite, Cathy. However, he came to realize that it is cruel to harvest dolphins for entertainment, by manipulating them as slaves. He feels deep regret for having taken part in popularizing this form of punishment. He also keeps mentioning, in some sort of disgusting, ironic glee, that if he weren’t an activist out to save Dolphins, he could easily be making millions of dollars by capturing them.

What Psihoyos does get from O’Barry is a direct challenge to Aristotle. O’Barry insists that Cathy willingly committed suicide. He claims that dolphins are cursed with the appearance of always smiling so that we cannot detect their inner pain. The film makes a case that dolphins are potentially smarter than humans. They actively engage in fun and entertainment, understand sign language, and communicate with each other. This depiction of dolphins as being self-aware provides a significant level of empathy that contributes to the overall impact of the entire film.

Unfortunately, Psihoyos is not interested in a deep exploration of O’Barry’s inner psyche and life philosophy. He merely skims the surface of a complex human life. I believe that an opportunity has been missed. In the hands of a great documentarian like Errol Morris, O’Barry would become a film subject to rival the likes of Robert Crumb and Robert S. McNamara, providing a deep meditation on the human experience. Instead Psihoyos makes the same error as This Film Is Not Yet Rated. He centers the film on how their information was obtained. Just as This Film Is Not Yet Rated became more of a private detective procedural than an examination of the MPAA, The Cove settles for being a nighttime, espionage thriller. It’s a well done thriller, but it dilutes the purpose and distracts from important, and frankly more interesting, issues involving mercury content and Japan’s bribing of third world countries. To compliment the tone of a thriller, Psiyohos provides a standard, manipulative score, which both hypes the moments of suspense, and attempts to create tears out of the quiet, gentle passages. Ideally, the film doesn’t need a score at all. The images speak for themselves and what we lose are the sounds of nature. Using the theme song to Flipper proves to be an exquisite musical choice, as the more we hear it, the more grotesque and soulless that little melody becomes. But then Psihoyos uses “Smile” in a similar way. It’s not appropriate to potentially link Chaplin’s life affirming tune with the image of slaughtered dolphins. On the other hand, the use of David Bowie’s “Heroes” serves as the perfect note to end the film.

What makes The Cove special, transcending past the likes of An Inconvenient Truth and Fahrenheit 451 is the image of the slaughter. It’s a shocking, despairing scene: the fulfillment of God’s first plague on Egypt. A bold and striking depiction of the carnality of man. An almost unbearable spectacle, only made palatable by Ric O’Barry’s following coup, which represents hope, triumph and personal reassurance in the civility of the human race.

-Jason Bardin

Great Film. Stop dolphin slaughter!!!!

Comment by Raul 03.09.10 @ 2:23 am