TV REVIEW : ‘Zoo’ a Sly, Ironic Look Behind the Bars

The ambivalence that many people have about zoos runs through Frederick Wiseman’s new film like a kind of glue, holding the work’s various pieces together.

“Zoo” (at 9 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28, 8 p.m. on KPBS-TV Channel 15) doesn’t view the urban compound for exotic creatures--in this case, the Miami Metrozoo--as merely a fun zone or as a symbol of society’s alienation from nature. Zoos, seen through Wiseman’s lens, are much more complicated places.

The course of the images, as subtly structured as in any film Wiseman has ever made, suggest a place very different from an entertainment attraction divorced from natural forces. At the same time, though, Wiseman seems to enjoy the loping stride of elephants, the dance-like balancing act of flamingos or the orchestral call of birds in the zoo’s massive outdoor aviary as much as the visitors--whom he also can’t resist observing with some irony.

As the bubbly child visitors happily pull their parents through the zoo grounds and a perpetual Florida sun casts its glow over this green place, another savage world is nearby. Wiseman repeatedly juxtaposes summery fun with close-ups of the animals eating food or prey. He has found the subject that perfectly meshes the clinical and carefree tone of his “Central Park” with the uncensored approach to physical processes of his “Near Death.” “Zoo” is remarkably unafraid of observing animal biology and the food chain, and is absolutely not for anyone who would rather look the other way.

The first hour keeps coming back to the drama of an African rhino mother and her stillborn calf. Other documentary filmmakers would show moments of the mother’s labor, then cut away, but Wiseman holds on: He shows zoo assistants tending to the dead calf, then the mother being fed the next morning, then the calf and the placenta being examined, then the calf thrown in the zoo’s incinerator.

The incinerator reappears later, when a pit bull is tracked down, shot and disposed of for killing some deer and antelope. Soon after, we see a rabbit reluctantly killed by a zoo worker, who then tosses it into a snake’s pen, where the rabbit is swallowed whole. The operation for neutering a wolf is shown, characteristically, from beginning to end.

The workers here clearly love animals, but they must kill some once in awhile. This is a bloody, happy, deathly, exuberant place, with even less overheard conversation than in most Wiseman films. “Zoo” is disturbingly lush and austere, bookended by the misleading entertainments of a dancing elephant show and a lavish fund-raiser for zoo donors.

When Wiseman’s camera captures an elephant trying to wrap its trunk around tuxedo-clad party-goers, it presents the wild, the civilized and the strange meeting ground between the two we call the zoo.