Year of Release: 1988Country of Origin: USA
Director: Michael Apted
Cast: Sigourney Weaver, Bryan Brown, Julie Harris, John Omirah Miluwi
Plot outline: The story of anthropologist Dian Fossey, centering around the extensive work she accomplished with gorillas, and her murder in Rwanda in 1985 (IMDb).
Gorillas in the Mist tells a life story that many people already know: what Dian Fossey accomplished and what happened to her, but it doesn't tell us who she was, and at the end that's what we want to know. Here is a movie that has gone to great lengths to be technically accomplished - the shots of the apes are everything we could wish for - but the screenplay has been skimped on, and there is a person missing here somewhere. What we are really dealing with here are two stories that do not fit together very easily. Do we care more about the public Fossey, or the private? Is her work more important, or her madness? In these modern times we demand the whole life. We say we are realists and don't want the autobiography cleaned up for a "screen version," but the result is a movie that is much more depressing and shapeless than it should be. The parabolas are wrong; Fossey's work fills us with joy, but her fate fills us with confusion and dismay. Perhaps a Hollywood cop-out would have been more satisfactory, with Fossey against the bad guys and everyone assigned their role, and some kind of a happy ending.We leave the theater feeling that when Fossey was buried in her beloved jungle, the third act of the movie was buried there, too. (RE)
My judgement: **1/2 out of 4 stars
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