TV Reviews : Sentimentality Limits Discovery’s ‘Chimps’

Uneasily straddling the sentimental and the scientific, Hugo van Lawick’s 20-years-in-the-making “People of the Forest: The Chimps of Gombe” (on the Discovery Channel, Sunday at 9 p.m. and midnight) cannot quite escape the realm of Walt Disney wildlife adventure movies.

In one way, this is fine: Like the Disney tales of critters with names like “Mr. Coyote,” “People of the Forest” turns a family of chimpanzees in Tanzania’s Gombe forest into, well, a more genuine family than any number of sitcom clans. The unit led by mother Flo, with observant daughter Fifi, her two older brothers Faben and Figan, and the rambunctious baby, Flint, even lends new meaning to the phrase single-mother family .

But there’s the rub. It’s undeniably true--Van Lawick’s epic documentation is definitive proof--that chimps possess strikingly human qualities, and the viewer can sense looking back on our evolutionary ancestors. Yet Martin Booth’s scripted narration (delivered too quietly by Donald Sutherland) wanders far off from the tone of the sympathetic observing scientist and into unfounded psychology. Flint becomes “a spoiled brat.” The siblings “notice Fifi’s mood has changed: She was pregnant.”

How is this known for sure? Short of putting a chimp on the couch for a session, Van Lawick’s patient observation of behavior is the closest we’ll get to these endangered animals (he’s the ex-husband of legendary chimp documenter Jane Goodall). But it is a long stretch from following the ebbs and flows of a growing family of chimps, the patterns of affection and aggression, and then imposing purely human mental processes on them. After 90 minutes, we feel as if we’re close to Fifi and her kin, but it’s more to do with a movie’s ability to manipulate our emotions than anything else.