To review a film after it’s been awarded an Oscar is like evaluating a bottle of wine after you’ve seen its price tag. “This one’s got to be good,” you think. I’m cheating a bit, but, I finally saw “The Cove” last night at the Asia Society in New York, and it lived up to its newly acquired label.
I was wary, too. The Oscar nominations for Best Documentary glossed over two of the best documentaries I’ve seen, not just recently, but ever: “Tyson” by James Toback and “The Story of Anvil” by Sacha Gervasi. Both Toback and Gervasi are old hands in the film world; Toback has directed half-a-dozen movies, and Gervasi wrote the screenplay for “The Terminal.” I think these documentaries were overlooked because of their politics, or lack thereof. Hollywood likes Issues That Matter – global warming, health care. Washed-up rockers don’t make the cut.
“The Cove” is about an ad-hoc band of activists – an Australian surfer, a National Geographic photographer, and an airplane technician, among others – who want to film an inlet in Taiji, Japan where fisherman capture and butcher 23,000 dolphins each year. It’s not just an animal rights nightmare. The dolphin meat, which is served in school lunches throughout Japan, contains dangerous levels of mercury. The cove is buttressed by jagged cliffs as well as droves of Japanese policemen and the shot is nearly impossible to capture. The documentary quickly turns into a crime thriller: there are bad guys with silly nicknames (“Private Space”), chase scenes, covert missions. In other activist documentaries, like “An Inconvenient Truth” and anything by Michael Moore, the activism occurs in the distribution and marketing; it’s your attention they’re after. Instead, ‘The Cove” is a film about being an activist – the filmmakers risk arrest to complete the film. It’s a story. Not a well-shot lecture.
Louie Psihoyos, the director of the film, is a photojournalist by training. This is his first film. “That doesn’t say a lot for other filmmakers,” he said last night, in a discussion after the screening. Psihoyos produced the film with a $2.4 million dollar loan. A theatrical release and an Oscar later, he’s still not close to paying it back. In “The Cove,” the Academy celebrated, not only one of the year’s best documentary films, but all of the neophytes making them.
