Cove, The (Theatrical)

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"The Cove" is scoring big points with audiences for obvious reasons. Japanese fishermen in the village of Taiji herd thousands of dolphins a year into the titular cove where the most promising are sold for big bucks to work as show animals. The rest are slated for a more gruesome fate, butchered on the spot and sold for meat.

Flipper sandwiches? You don´t need much more than that idea to rile up viewers and it´s a good thing because director Louie Psihoyos and writer Mark Monroe don´t have much else to offer in this poorly argued, scattershot activist tract.

The film´s nominal hero is Ric O´Barry, a former trainer on the popular 60s television show "Flipper." He feels guilty for his role in training and helping keep dolphins captive, and he has made it his life´s mission to redeem himself by fronting the global anti-captivity movement. O´Barry has run afoul of the law in the course of his activities and was found guilty and fined in a case where two of the dolphins he released into the wild were seriously injured. This, of course, is not mentioned in "The Cove," which portrays him uncritically as a noble crusader. On that front, I refer you to this article from the Miami New Times which paints a more complex picture of Mr. O´Barry than shown in the documentary.

O´Barry says that one of the dolphins he trained on the show jumped into his arms and committed suicide by refusing to breathe (dolphins are voluntary breathers.) I won´t pretend to know what happened but it´s a dubious enough claim that it at least deserves to be investigated, but the documentary once again steers away from any questioning of its hero. His every word is accepted as scripture, as are multiple claims by other activists who consistently anthropomorphize dolphins. Our aquatic friends, it seems, are just like people except smarter, nicer and certainly cuter.

"The Cove" relies heavily on the latter quality to pluck viewer heartstrings. When a quivery-voiced O´Barry tells us that the dolphins are actually eaten in Japan, the audience is supposed to be horrified because, well, they´re so darned cute. Or at least that´s been the primary focus of the film up until that point. Belatedly in its second half, the film presents a few substantive arguments against this practice, the most pragmatic being the high levels of mercury poisoning found in most dolphins that render them too toxic for human consumption. For the most part, the documentary just milks the Flipper factor to its last droplet.

The issue of dolphin intelligence, surely the most crucial to this discussion, is raised but is treated anecdotally. A surfer dude relates an encounter in which a dolphin allegedly pushed a shark out of the way to save his life. Once again, the filmmakers don´t challenge this story (perhaps the dolphin was trying to save its own life) and there´s no substantive discussion of what differentiates dolphins from other mammals in this area. Is there a certain level of intelligence at which animals become "not food" instead of "food" and how do we determine where that line is drawn? Dolphins but not pigs? Why? Horses but not chickens? Why? I realize that a documentary can´t be all inclusive but a superficial treatment of such an important matter is symptomatic of the film´s rhetorical shortcomings.