Word: fossey
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...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...
...Dian Fossey was a figure of the latter sort. She went to Rwanda in east- central Africa as a child of the '60s, hoping to find a bit of adventure by observing an endangered subspecies, the mountain gorilla. In 1985 she was murdered, under mysterious circumstances, at the research station she had built up for nearly 20 lonely years. In that time, an agreeable young woman became a hard, half-mad case who nonetheless saved "her" gorillas from almost certain extinction...
...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...
...unceasing struggles with poachers and politics as she fights to save the mountain gorillas from extinction. Her Africa is not the ordered master-and-servant backdrop of Isak Dinesen's tales. Three French visitors make a wrong turn on a back road and get fatally detained by Congolese troops. Fossey angrily tells her family, "They were reportedly tortured . . . hung on racks, finally eaten. The Congo can't be covered by the press, like Vietnam, thus no one knows what really happens." But Fossey knew and pressed on. The stubbornness killed her. Broken in health, stalked by resentful poachers, distrusted...