Screengrab editor emeritus Bilge Ebiri reports from the frontlines of Park City.
My childhood dream was to become a marine biologist and grow gills, so I should probably fess up to being a particularly apt target audience for Louie Psihoyos’s devastating documentary about the slaughter of dolphins in the small Japanese town of Taiji. To simply label The Cove a movie about dolphin-killing, though, would be inaccurate. Much of it is devoted to a portrait of Richard O’Barry, a dolphin rights activist whose journey could have come out of some bizarre post-modern American novel. O’Barry was the trainer who caught and trained the five dolphins who collectively played the titular super dolphin in the hit 60s series Flipper. Living and working with them for years and years, he became convinced of their blinding intelligence. He also became aware that they were utterly miserable in captivity at the Miami Seaquarium, where O'Barry also lived. (The house in Flipper was actually his house.) When one of the dolphins died in his arms – he’s convinced it was a suicide – his whole reality changed. As he says himself, he was arrested the next day in Bimini of trying to release a dolphin into the wild. He’s been arrested many, many times since, as he has become what he calls an abolitionist for the dolphin trade.
The Cove is structured around O’Barry’s attempts to infiltrate the lagoon in Taiji where, for months on end, thousands of dolphins are lured and killed en masse. Killing dolphins is legal in Japan, but the cove happens to be in a national park. Furthermore, for all the noise some make about dolphin-killing being some kind of age-old tradition, the vast majority of Japanese are unaware of – and indeed horrified by -- the practice. Along with a crack team of thrill seekers, free divers, and Hollywood effects experts, O’Barry mounts what amounts to an elaborate break-in, and Psihoyos films and edits it with all the breathless panache of an Ocean’s 11 sequence. The footage they do end up capturing, with fixed, hidden cameras, makes up the film’s finale, and it is as horrific as one might expect.
The Cove is by no means perfect. I have serious issues with Psihoyos’s decision to include himself as a main talking head, which gives it at times the feel of a news report rather than a film. And certainly, the film is tackling an issue so complex that it can’t possibly answer all of the serious questions it provokes. As grisly as the dolphin slaughter is, wouldn’t it be just as horrifying to see the inner workings of your average American slaugherhouse? (To his credit, O’Barry addressed this issue in an interview I did with him for New York Magazine.) But it is nevertheless an exhilarating experience. The efforts of O’Barry and his crew to get into the cove provides a visceral kick to the film that a simple advocacy doc might have lacked. Imagine if An Inconvenient Truth showed Al Gore assembling a crack team to break into Exxon headquarters or some particularly nasty coal plant, and you might get the idea. There are, in essence, three films battling for supremacy in The Cove – a portrait of O’Barry, a record of the infiltration, and a general look at the world dolphin trade. It would be impossible to wrap up all of these in an entirely satisfying manner; even simply capturing the footage at the cove prompts the question, “Now what?” In other words, if The Cove at times feels a little incomplete, perhaps it is because it hopes that, to paraphrase Sam Fuller, we will have to complete it ourselves.
