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A Review of ‘Lucy the Human Chimp’ by Sheri Linden

There's no such thing as a human chimp, but half a century ago, a chimpanzee's conditioning by her human "parents" famously blurred the lines. Lucy Temerlin lived in the suburbs with a psychologist and his wife, went for rides with them in the station wagon, and enjoyed the occasional gin and tonic. After a point, though — that point being puberty — she spent most of her time in a backyard chain-link cage because her size and aggressiveness were wreaking havoc on this nuclear family's domestic bliss.

Going beyond the headlines, filmmaker Alex Parkinson revisits the groundbreaking case through the firsthand recollections of a key participant, one who met Lucy after her days as an experimental subject and followed her well into her troubled retirement. As its title signals, Lucy the Human Chimp is a story of communion, but also of a certain naivete and misplaced idealism. Love and devotion define Lucy's extraordinary biography. So do human folly and chimpanzee trauma.

The documentary, which premieres on April 29 on HBO Max (a shorter version bows 10 days earlier on Channel 4 in the U.K.), revolves around two unforgettable figures. First, there's Lucy, born as an intended entertainment attraction in a roadside zoo, snatched from her mother's arms — literally — in the name of science, and ultimately torn from the creature comforts to which she'd become accustomed, transferred to a natural setting that was utterly foreign to her. The second central character is Janis Carter, arguably Lucy's best friend. Her revelatory straight-to-camera interview shapes the film; she deeply felt memories illustrated by archival stills and footage as well as reenactments.

Carter was a grad student at the University of Oklahoma's Institute for Primate Studies when, in 1976, she took a part-time job working for psychologist Maurice Temerlin and his wife, Jane, as caretaker to Lucy. From the outset, this was no ordinary gig. A graduate of the institute's sign language project, Lucy was 11 at the time, had a vocabulary of 120 words, and had spent all but the first two days of her life living with the Temerlins. But as much as the couple still regarded her as their daughter, she had outgrown the cute-and-cuddly stage and was considered unpredictable and dangerous. They forbade Carter from engaging with Lucy, instructing her to simply feed the chimp and clean up after her. But Lucy had other ideas.

Recognizing the bond that developed between Lucy and Carter, the Temerlins eventually invited their employee to participate in the next, difficult chapter of Lucy's life: placing her in a new home on the other side of the world. A project of the Abuko Nature Reserve in The Gambia in western Africa was dedicated to teaching chimps raised in captivity how to live in the wild. The plan was for Carter to stay there with Lucy a few days longer than the Temerlins. But seeing how disoriented, depressed, and weak her friend was growing in the new environment, Carter delayed her return to the States. Speaking of the commitments that were waiting for her back home, she lists them in this telling order: a teaching assistantship, a dog, a boyfriend.

Other chimps at Abuko would be placed in Carter's care, and though she explains now that she was winging it, her work there was featured on an episode of Mutual of Omaha's the Wild Kingdom, a longtime staple of Sunday-night broadcast TV. Parkinson makes strong use of this footage, as he does of material from the personal collections of Carter and Jane Temerlin. More intimate exchanges between his doc's two central characters are enacted by Lorna Nickson Brown as a wide-eyed and openhearted 25-year-old Carter and Peter Elliott, in a chimpanzee suit as Lucy — an approach that works thanks to careful framing and strategic blurring.

Through her fidelity to Lucy, Carter would find her calling, changing her life in ways that most people wouldn't dare consider, let alone carry out. She braved dangers, embraced solitude, and found a way of living in a "perfect paradise." As to what Lucy found, we'll never know and can only guess. But nobody could come closer than Carter does in shedding light on Lucy's story, on the real connections she made in the world of human beings, and at what cost. Parkinson's doc is a heart-wrenching reminder of how little we know — and are willing to acknowledge — about the intelligence and emotional lives of nonhuman earthlings.

The Temerlins, in Carter's words, had found themselves in a predicament of their own making. Their nature-vs.-nature explorations were well-meaning but desperately benighted, something they're both heard acknowledging in the film. In voiceover, Jane makes her regrets clear. Maurice, in an interview clip from Good Morning America after the 1975 publication of his book Lucy: Growing Up Human, admits to David Hartman that "Lucy might have missed something not knowing chimpanzees."

Among the film's most piercing details is Carter's memory of Lucy's farewell hug, a gesture that was intense with feeling and, crucially, initiated by the chimp. For most of Lucy's life, she could only react to one inexplicable disruption after another. Another detail that stands out in this unforgettable saga: On the flight to Africa, Lucy traveled in the cargo hold, and the first-class passengers could hear her screams.

A Review of “Born to Be” by Godfrey Cheshire

While many documentaries treat subjects that are also covered in books or magazine articles, certain exceptional nonfiction films remind you of the power and clarity that cinema can offer—especially concerning human subjects—compared to written accounts.

Case in point, Tania Cypriano's "Born to Be" concerns the pioneering work in gender reassignment surgery being done by Dr. Jess Ting at New York's Mount Sinai Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery, and the film's main characters are Dr. Ting and five of his patients. After seeing the movie, I imagined encountering the same material in a magazine article. The basic information conveyed might well have been the same, I realized, but my experience of it would have been radically different because I would have missed the kind of direct encounter with the humanity of its subjects that cinema so uniquely affords.

From one angle, this has to do with Cypriano's technique, which could be called immersive. From the beginning, we see Dr. Ting in his work environment, both talking with and operating on his patients, and the perspective is as close and intimate as can be. Cypriano worked with just herself, a producer, and cinematographer Jeffrey Johnson (whose work is terrific) in the clinical filming situations, letting us get absorbed by the people in front of the camera without the interference that a larger crew would have entailed.

Another factor here, though, is the level of trust that exists on all sides. Quite obviously, Dr. Ting’s patients have invested a high degree of trust in him, and he responds by trusting them. But no less notable is the trust that all concerned have given the filmmakers. You can’t help but sense that all the patients got to know Cypriano and her crew well enough not just to be comfortable with their presence but to sense that they would tell their stories sensitively, honorably, accurately.

You might call this an aesthetic of compassionate complicity, and its benefits are evident throughout "Born to Be." The film's nuanced and engaging portraits begin with Dr. Ting, whose floppy hair, spectacles, and laid-back manner could as easily belong to the downtown artist as to a renowned surgeon. And there's a certain truth to that impression. He was a classical double bassist who excelled at Juilliard before switching to medicine due to pressure from a family that worried about the uncertainty of a career in the arts.

Excelling again in his new field, Ting was comfortably established as a plastic surgeon when the challenge of transgender medicine came along and gave him a new mountain to conquer. You sense that he quickly knew that this would be his life's work and that it was particularly suited to his makeup in two senses. First, it engaged his sympathy and skills in working with people, where his grasp of psychology is as important as his abilities in the operating room. Second, it seems to have spurred his willingness to be an innovator and a pioneer, constantly inventing new techniques and technologies in a field that is nothing if not rapidly developing.

In recent years, Ting has taken the lead in advancing the practice of both giving female sexual organs to born males (vaginoplasties) and male organs to born females (phalloplasties), along with other surgeries that help the patients physically realize the images of their chosen gender identities. The film gives enough discussion to the surgical strategies employed here to afford viewers an understanding of the medical issues and innovations involved with Ting's work. Yet all of this might come across as dry and clinical were it not for something else that's powerfully conveyed: the meaning of the operations for the people undergoing them.

The five patients the movie focuses on are an engaging bunch, representing different races, ages, and backgrounds but all committed to their quests for self-transformation. Cashmere (as one male-to-female patient identifies herself) almost seems to personify recent decades of New York City transgender experience. Witty and self-possessed, she says she left home at 16 and suffered the trials of being identified as a gay youth before undertaking her first gender reassignment surgeries (crude early manifestations that she's now looking to Dr. Ting to correct). Evidently, once a part of the ball culture depicted in Jenny Livingston's 1990 documentary "Paris Is Burning,” she says of the people shown there, “They are all dead.”

Two other African-American protagonists in “Born to Be” personify the determination and strength of character exemplified by people reaching for different sides of the gender spectrum. Mahogany was once a highly paid and very successful male model in South Africa (photos show a stunning image of muscular African male beauty) who gave it all up and plunged into poverty in pursuing her ideal of becoming female; she is now working with Dr. Ting on feminizing her facial features. Shawn, meanwhile, is a burly, bearded guy who says he always knew he was male; it just took Dr. Ting to make that a physical reality.

Two younger, white protagonists make their transformations while emerging from different kinds of family situations. Jordan, who identifies as non-binary (and prefers the pronouns "they" and "them"), had to battle their family's incomprehension but now has the support of a partner in transitioning from female to the male anatomy. Devin, who later goes by Garnet, came from Texas and was abused as an effeminate boy but had a family that supported her lovingly and unequivocally (we see them, and their feelings are moving and persuasive). Despite this comforting background and the success of surgery that leaves her beautiful enough to work as a fashion model, Garnet says she is still drawn back to the "dark places" of despair and misery in her mind, a reminder that an estimated 45% of transgender people attempt suicide at some point.

In recent times, as transgender people have become more visible in culture, the news media, and the political sphere, debates have swirled around both the psychological and the sociopolitical issues involving them. Thankfully, "Born to Be" doesn't try to delve into the rhetoric and intellectual formulations such disagreements produce. Rather, it escorts us into a world where genders are being transformed and say, "Look, see, these are real people with lives and personalities and dreams—behold them and make up your own mind." A brave, revelatory, and beautifully realized film, it is easily one of the year's best and most important documentaries.