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'The
Cove' is a must-see documentary |
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By STEVEN
SNYDER - TimeOut Film Critic
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October 9,
2009 |
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Before
I tell you what it’s about, I feel it’s first necessary to
tell you how "The Cove" made me feel. This is one of
the most exciting, enthralling, heartbreaking, aggravating and
inspiring films of the year.
As a film, it transcends your typical documentary. As a story,
it’s about a whole lot more than a barbaric dolphin
slaughter that’s allowed to happen every year in Japan, and
the environmentalists who commit themselves to stopping the
bloodshed.
Yes, it’s a dolphin documentary. But it’s the year’s
best thriller. Even if you don’t care about dolphins, or
have never even thought about the issue of animal rights or
overfishing, you will walk out of "The Cove"
exhilarated and quite possible exhausted. In short: It’s a
must-see.
I consider it to be this year’s "Man on Wire"
(last year’s epic thrill ride about the artist who broke
into the World Trade Center in the 1970s just so he could
scale to the top and walk a tightrope between the two towers).
Both films are non-fiction page-turners, with "The
Cove" about a filmmakerturned-activist so horrified by
the dolphin slaughter in rural Japan that he hatches a plan to
commit the carnage on film.
"You try to do the story legally," says an
exasperated Louie Psihoyos as he researches these killings and
the lax oversight behind them. But after being stymied by
government officials, attacked by fisherman and tailed by the
police, he decides to don his night vision goggles and
orchestrate elaborate late-night missions to catch the fish
killers red handed.
Recruited to the cause by Richard O’Barry, a dolphin trainer
for the TV show Flipper who now blames himself for the global
dolphin fixation, Psihoyos assembles a motley crew of
technicians to rig cameras in the bloodstained cove off the
town of Taijii. It’s no small feat, with the special police
on your tail, but then very little about this situation seems
simple. Psihoyos connects the dots, linking the capturing and
killing to a lucrative aquarium industry (where a live dolphin
can net $150,000), the ignorant Japanese consumer, an impotent
global regulatory system and a rebounding whaling industry,
that threatens to devastate Earth’s underwater ecosystem.
We realize what’s on display here is not merely an isolated
incident of overprotective fishermen but a cultural mindset
that is geared at taking as much as possible from the ocean
without regard for the way in which their actions are upending
the balance of marine wildlife. This is an attack on the
health of the world’s water supplies.
The politics are shocking, but O’Barry’s outrage is the
film’s rousing call to arms. This cove, he says, is the
biggest battle of his war, and this rebel knows that if he is
ever to defeat his sovereign enemy, it must begin with a
victory over the bloody secrets of this remote inlet. What’s
going on here is so wrong and unjustifiable that if he can’t
make a dent here, he says he won’t be able to do anything of
use.
This is the chronicling of a small group of men setting out to
defeat something unjust. And by making us first empathize with
their cause, and then allowing us to see the commitment
required to make a dent in the opposition, "The
Cove" stirs some serious emotions in us. It’s that
rarest of documentary that sends an audience away not just
entertained but motivated to actually do something.
E-mail: SnyderReviews@hotmail.com
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