Word: mowat
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Farley Mowat, a maverick Canadian with his own obsessions about endangered wildlife (Never Cry Wolf; A Whale for the Killing) has an even greater concern for the truth; he ransacks the victim's diaries, analyzes her work and interviews some hostile associates who believe "she got what she wanted"; "She mistreated everyone around her and finally was done in." A strange figure begins to emerge from the mists. From childhood on, Mowat observes, the coltish, willful Californian was beset with resentments toward the father who deserted his family when she was six. Spiritually restless, she converted to Roman Catholicism, then...
...Mowat is scrupulously fair: he shows his subject antagonizing co-workers as she lurches from tantrum to euphoria and back again, but he praises her meticulous observations of animal life and her 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...
...OPENING has Mowat sitting in the middle of a glacial field, attempting to ward off an enveloping blizzard with the comical and futile bureaucratic gesture of typing a work report. By the end of the film he is running stark naked in the midst of a stampeding herd of caribou. Neither scenes are models of scientific investigation--let alone verisimilitude--but they serve admirable to frame Mowat's journey into awareness through the medium of Ballard's slightly surreal vision. If at times the meshing of beguiling photography with the Tangerine Dream-like score begins dangerously to suggest Jean-Jacques...
Even the moments of Disney-esque nature whimsy have a more adult flavor than usual. The film's wry humor rises to considerable heights when Mowat, attempting to gain the trust and respect of the wolves, marks his territory with many teapots and several hours worth or urination--a process which takes the head or alpha-wolf George only two brief minutes...
...only be thankful that George and his pack are allowed to maintain their autonomy of lupine identity--they're not vested with comforting little anthropomorphic traits that would make them seem at home mowing our neighbors' lawn. In fact, it is Mowat who consistently tries to come closer to the wolves' style of life, as his attempt to approximate their diet (mice) and territory-marking habits illustrate. These two comical and slightly disgusting episodes grow out of the film's deeply serious message, that it is not for us to quantify and tame nature, but simply to live...