The Cove

By Matt Prigge
Add Comment Add Comment | Comments: 0 | Posted Aug. 4, 2009

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Activist documentaries tend to be so hysterical in their aesthetics—begging and pleading with you and thwacking you over the head to get with whatever the pet cause—that it was only a matter of time before one of them abandoned subtlety altogether and played exactly like a high-concept thriller. Welcome The Cove.

Following soon after the shaky-cam overfishing alarm that was The End of the Line, The Cove’s aquatic concerns are far more specific, namely the scenic coastal town of Taiji, Japan, whose fishermen wrangle up dolphins, sell the ones that look like Flipper and then gorily discard of the rest. The slaughter has been allowed to continue largely because of high security—which the makers and stars of The Cove take as a dare.

As activist-filmmaker Louie Psihoyos and renowned dolphin trainer Ric O’Barry—who worked on Flipper in the ’60s and has since, by way of penance, tried to wipe out captivity of these intelligent creatures—rustle up a group of diverse techies to impregnate this fortress and shoot damning footage, it’s impossible not to picture a remake starring George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Matt Damon. Sure enough, one of the stars brings up Ocean’s 11.

As a thriller, The Cove is indeed thrilling, painting the struggle in broad, audience-friendly strokes: The heroes are valiant and righteous; the villains—mostly callous fishermen and blank-faced corporate yes-men—are hissable. It’s here the film becomes a bit problematic. There’s little use resisting the film’s m.o., even before it’s coughing up footage of stabbed dolphins or water freshly painted crimson. And when it’s revealed that the offed dolphins, swimming in toxic levels of mercury, have been sold as school lunches, it’s time to shake one’s fist.

But The Cove never goes deeper. It never explores, for instance, how a society could be bred to produce such evil deeds. The baddies are simply baddies, and that’s that. (After one exec is fired at the end, the film notes that he was also diagnosed with mercury poisoning. Take that!)

Such a stark black-and-white portrayal might be passable in a narrative film, but is less so in a documentary, where the people on-screen are actual flesh-and-blood. This gives The Cove the stink of agitprop. As Psihoyos himself puts it, “You’re either an activist or an inactivist.” But does his film really need a Bushian worldview? Isn’t the mere sight of bloody dolphins enough to rally the troops? B-

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