Word: fossey
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Actress Sigourney Weaver claimed a rare Oscar double nomination for best actress for Gorillas in the Mist: The Adventure of Dian Fossey and best supporting actress for Working Girl...
...notes in his preface, "My vision of the tropics was, and still is, largely romantic." This mood seems to represent a triumph of hope over experience. Three of the visits recorded here were prompted by somber, decidedly unromantic events. Shoumatoff went to Rwanda shortly after naturalist Dian Fossey was hacked to death with a machete in her remote mountainside camp. The trial of former emperor Jean-Bedel Bokassa -- on charges ranging from corruption to cannibalism -- drew him to the Central African Republic. And the spread of AIDS across the continent inspired a depressing pilgrimage through a belt of impoverished, afflicted...
...that catastrophes, man-made and otherwise, are pummeling Africa. But Shoumatoff's first-person reports do not simply catalog misery. Once on the scene, the author concentrates on the feel of a place and the conversation of the local residents, building the big picture through small details. He acknowledges Fossey's courage in trying to protect an endangered band of mountain gorillas; he also discovers that her love for the great apes was matched by her contempt for the Rwandan people. In the Central African Republic he encounters people who wonder why the West makes such a fuss about eating...
...virtue of Anna Hamilton Phelan's script, Michael Apted's direction and Sigourney Weaver's strong, stark performance that they resist sentimentalizing Fossey. The filmmakers seem content with the notion that saintliness is a form of lunacy. For their lack of conventional biopic piety, they deserve respectful gratitude...
...most of the movie's tensions are inside Fossey, and therefore invisible. Her friendships in the animal kingdom provide images that are at first entrancing, then repetitive. Her affair with a photographer (Bryan Brown) is never a believable enticement toward a return to civilization. And since Gorillas in the Mist does not reveal whether Fossey's murder was the consequence of the life she chose or just an absurd mischance, the story ends inconclusively, in a moral and dramatic...