Fossey is played by Sigourney Weaver, who makes her passionate and private and has an exquisite tenderness and tact in her delicate scenes with wild animals. It is impossible to imagine a more appropriate choice for the role. But she grows away from us as the movie reaches its conclusion. A woman we have come to know turns into a stranger, and even if that is what happened to Fossey - even if she did pull a cocoon of obsession around her - we deserve to see that happening, and to understand it. The screenplay simply presents it as an accomplished fact.
There is also a rather canned feeling to the romance in the central scenes of the film, when a National Geographic photographer (Bryan Brown) turns up in the jungle, and the two people fall in love.
He arrives, they become lovers, and then he tells her that he has an assignment on the other side of the world and he wants her to come along. He cannot, he says, stay in the jungle forever; he has a job to do. She tells him she will not leave, and that, if he does, he need not ever return, or ever write. Was this argument not inevitable from the moment they first met? Did the photographer expect this woman to leave? Did she expect him to stay? They never really talk with one another, and so we're not sure.
The movie's best scenes involve her gradual acceptance by the gorillas. Here it is hard to say who should get the most credit: those who photographed real animals in the jungle or those who used special effects to create animals, and parts of animals, for particular shots.
I imagine that some of the closeups of a gorilla's hand, clasping Weaver's, were done with Rick Baker's special effects creations. I imagine some of the gorillas in the jungle are real, and some are men inside gorilla suits. But the work is done so seamlessly that I could never be sure. Everything looked equally real to me, and the delicacy with which director Michael Apted developed the relationships between woman and beast was deeply absorbing. There were moments when I felt a touch of awe. Those moments, which are genuine, make the movie worth seeing.
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