Shaun de Waal Not the movie of the week
Instinct is one of those big-budget films that are so fake and empty that one mourns the lavishing of all that money on such an unworthy project. How many interesting low-budget independent movies could have been made for that amount? Besides, I’m sure the gorillas of Rwanda need the funds.
Anthony Hopkins, playing what is essentially a version of Hannibal Lecter without the gourmet tastes (or the wit), is primatologist Ethan Powell, who has lived au naturel with a group of gorillas for a while. As the film opens, he is being held captive in a Rwandan jail, having savagely murdered a couple of men in the jungle. Now he is being repatriated to the United States, where he will undergo examination to determine his sanity, or lack of it. Except that he hasn’t uttered a word since his incarceration.
Cuba Gooding Jnr plays the ambitious, eager-beaver young psychiatrist, Theo Caulder, who takes on (nay, positively grabs) the challenge of unravelling the mystery of what Powell did and why he won’t talk about it. In order to accomplish this, much earnest furrowing of brow is needed from Gooding and much glaring out from under his white mane is offered by Hopkins. Both are provided in generous quantities.
Unfortunately, the answers to Caulder’s questions are discernible to any alert viewer from about two minutes into the movie (probably from the trailer), and the secrets of Powell’s motivations come, when they eventually do come, as no surprise at all. As one critic said, Caulder spends the first half of the movie getting Powell to talk; for the rest of the film you wish he would shut up.
The roots of human wickedness, which the film pretends to address, and which it treats with a portentous reverence that signals Big Meaning Transmission, are dealt with in the most superficial way imaginable. Some babble about “takers” – most of the human race, it would seem – seeks to explain our violent impulses, while the gorillas are presumably models of balmy integration with nature. Obviously one sympathises with the beleaguered gorillas and deplores human rapacity and cruelty, but the breakdown of the conception of Mother Nature as purely benign began in the Victorian era, if not earlier. You will recall Alfred Tennyson, circa 1840, grappling with the idea of “nature red in tooth and claw”. Perhaps if Dr Powell had spent some time with South African baboons he would have a more complex view of primate relations.
This nonsense aside, Gooding and Maura Tierney, as Powell’s daughter, give reasonable performances. It is, however, hard to take them seriously: by the time Gooding’s Dr Caulder starts with his own tearful self-analysis, one is sighing with impatience or chuckling with Schadenfreude. And of course the film can’t resist a gratuitously uplifting prison-reform sequence (facing down the brutal guards, etcetera) as well as a sudden father-daughter reconciliation, not to mention an entirely vapid Hollywood ending.
There is some interest in the portrayal of Dr Caulder’s university psychology department, which seems as dog-eat-dog as the rest of human endeavour, but the film doesn’t take it very far. Donald Sutherland pops up as the senior shrink, and his minor hamming is more compelling than all Gooding’s emoting or Hopkins’s glowering. Sutherland has a white beard and head of hair to match Hopkins’s, but if some kind of symbolic link or opposition is being implied it is very vague. No confrontation of the white beards, which might for a moment have enlivened this pretentious bore of a movie, is forthcoming.