The ape was great; very realistic. It was an ape with character, a personality. There was no sense of it being artificial, except in the measure that it registered as so transparent as to warrant accolades.
This work at this level is evident virtuosity. It was an ape you could care for, care abut. Oddly, for myself, this was impeded by the girl's demonstration of her affection and care for him.
It was difficult, as it always is for me, to separate my experience of this version of the story from my original one with the original movie. The second movie doesn't count. This one does count, but the difference in the way the relationship between the girl and the ape was represented was not entirely appreciated.
The actress, Naomi Watts, is one of my favorites, and I do think she is exceptional again in the part. My issue is with the writing. It went too far for me, which disengaged my attention from the movie and placed it on the surface of the film, out from its involvement with the story.
I kept wishing that Jack Black's character would be louder, his personality bigger, and the rest of the males also more bolder, less sullen, less coniving. These are not men of the early twentieth century. Watch the old movies. Those characterizations of men in those times were full of confidence and certainty -- the women too were bold and particularly in the Thirties often brazen. There's a reserve in the people here that seems much more contemporary.
The extent of the girl's efforts to protect the ape was too much. She's practically an animal rights activist. It changes the whole way in which the ape stands in for some kind of distant male paternalistic power, like any beauty and the beast story does -- it's like the tarot card for strength in the traditional decks (the lion tamed by the fair maiden). Here, it becomes more like protecting the primitive yet kind against the civilized yet cruel. I suppose it's somewhat ironic that it would be a very modern sort of woman protecting the (iconic) primitive figure of the brute male.
Perhaps a remake is an opportunity to rethink things like love relationships in a contemporary context. This is an interesting prospect, and a worthwhile endeavour, I would say, after the fact. But at the time it was a distraction.
There is a distinction for me between movie and film. The movie is the thing I am wrapped up in. The film is the structure. Watching the film can be interesting, it can be a stunning aesthetic experience, but it is not like getting wrapped up in the lives of people, which is what watching a movie can be, with all its accompanying emotional and psychological complicity and duplicity.
Either the movie or the film may be judged according to their particular criterion by me, and they may result in contradictory judgments, as it does somewhat in this case.
