The Cove
Directed by Louie Psihoyos
At Beekman Theater & Angelika Film Center
Runtime: 92 min.
Documentaries don’t get more compelling than The Cove, a film that plays out more like a thriller than environmental advocacy. The film centers on Ric O’Barry, the trainer for Flipper who has since dedicated his life to freeing dolphins. He joins director Louie Psihoyos in Taiji, a Japanese town where whalers regularly slaughter thousands upon thousands of the lovable sea mammals. Some are sold to slave away in amusement parks where they live truncated, miserable lives. The rest are herded into a secret cove—the film’s namesake—and clandestinely killed for human consumption, despite their sky-high mercury content. The breadth of this horrible practice—in which the Japanese government is complicit—is astounding.
Although pertinent and thrilling, The Cove needs to be taken to task on many fronts, especially since most critics have offered little more than blind adulation
. On certain points, The Cove is misleading: Given the film’s tone, the audience undoubtedly gets the impression that Taiji’s cove is the epicenter of all dolphin slaughter in Japan, which is untrue. As The Cove reveals on its advocacy website, only 2,500 of the 23,000 dolphins killed each year in Japan are cove victims. The rest—approximately 20,500—are killed at sea.The film also slips up in its portrayal of the Japanese media, which is excoriated for completely ignoring the slaughter. That Taiji cove gets less attention than it deserves in Japan, but The Japan Times did an in-depth series of exposés that spanned over two years that focused on the dolphin killing and garnered two awards from the U.S. Humane Society. The Japan Times was also the first print publication anywhere to write about The Cove documentary, publishing a complimentary piece more than a year ago.
Beyond the factual level, the doc’s protagonists are nauseously self-righteous, akin to the San Fran Prius drivers from the episode of South Park that are so enamored of their eco-friendliness that they snort their own farts in wine glasses. Ric O’Barry takes it too far in his self-fashioned role as cetacean martyr. He walks around a whaling conference with a television strapped to himself, displaying the dolphin slaughter. As he plods among the delegates, it is not like the attendees can see the movie playing on his stomach—they see him, crusading Ric O’Barry.
While never short on self-love, The Cove does manage to botch cultural sensitivity. In the New York Times piece on The Cove, the writer—channeling the film—describes dolphins as “a species of animal that humans regard fondly.” We—Westerners and the Westernized (probably because of Flipper, in large part)—do indeed fondly regard dolphins. To extrapolate beyond that, as The Cove does, is just plain ethnocentric. Dolphins are intelligent, self-aware creatures, and for that, they deserve special consideration. But to project Westernized views on all of humanity is extreme. Keep in mind, Hindis could make a film called The Grange about American treatment of cows, and in their eyes we would look just as callous as those Japanese fisherman do to us.
The Cove is still a brilliant documentary—one of the best of 2009. It deserves an audience for its aesthetic beauty alone. But the film, like almost every issue-driven doc, lacks much-needed nuance, and audiences should remember to approach anything set out to manipulate their heartstrings with a decent level of skepticism.
anonymous
