Gorillas in the Mist (1988)

Michael Apted's 1988 account of Dian Fossey arrives with the sober equipment of the prestige biopic: a committed lead performance, sweeping East African vistas, and a heroine who dies before the credits. Sigourney Weaver plays the occupational therapist turned primatologist with a jaw set for martyrdom, and the gorillas, realized through Rick Baker's costumes and live footage, steal the picture from every human in it. The film knows its subject's accomplishments and traces them dutifully.

The conservationist spine is unmistakable. Fossey fights poachers, a gorilla trader, and later the encroaching tourism trade, and the epilogue informs us that her efforts helped pull the mountain gorilla back from extinction. That is a cause, presented as a cause, though the film keeps it inside a character drama instead of mounting a pulpit. Her refusal to abandon Karisoke for marriage registers as a woman defending a career in a field that did not welcome her, which is biography first and thesis a distant second. Sembagare and the Rwandan trackers are given real work and real dignity, cast as colleagues and not curiosities. The setting is treated with respect and no particular argument about who took what from whom.

What the film will not do is examine its heroine's mind. Critics at the time objected that Fossey's instability had been sanded down into mere eccentricity, a choice that drains the story of its strangest material. Race, empire, and the politics of the region pass by unremarked. There is no room here for questions of identity, embodiment, or desire beyond a single affair with a married photographer. The result is a well-made monument to a difficult woman, polished smooth, sincere, and only faintly sermonizing at the close.