Recasting 1988: "Gorillas in the Mist"

From the time I was a small child, I've been fascinated by the great expanses of the African wilderness. Nature shows on public television and eventually the Discovery Channel were a frequently viewed programs in my home. Of greatest interest were those which depicted large cats, but really anything featuring animals in Africa was interesting and exotic to me. 

It wasn't until much later that I was able to really appreciate the work of naturalists like Jane Goodall, David Attenborough, and Dian Fossey. The last of these names is of course the subject of the 1988 drama, Gorillas in the Mist.  

I have to admit that despite my own interest in natural history, I remember the previews for this movie more than the movie itself. I was nine when it was released in theaters, and I'm sure it would've been far too adult for me to have attended in person. It wasn't until college that actually ended up seeing it for the first time, and I watched it again a few months ago in quarantine when I decided I was going to include it in my recasting project. 

Directed by Michael Apted (Coal Miner's Daughter, Nell), Sigourney Weaver portrayed Fossey on screen. While I consider Meryl's performance in A Cry in the Dark to be the best of any actress that year, Gorillas would've been a great get. Fossey was an American primatologist who studied mountain gorillas in Rwanda. Her account of her work in the eponymous 1983 book serves as the source material for the screenplay. 

The film follows Fossey as she arrives in Africa, having pestered famed anthropologist Louis Leakey in the U.S. for a job in studying the gorillas. She's driven out of the Congo due to political unrest and moves across the mountains to Rwanda, where she's able to finally make some progress on her studies. There's of course a romantic subplot between her and photographer Bob Campbell (Bryan Brown), but the main focus really is Fossey's increasingly fanatical defense of her primate friends against money-hungry poachers.

             

Pretty bad-ass. It's probably not much of a spoiler for a biopic to reveal that Fossey is brutally bludgeoned to death in the end. Theories abound as to who may have done it or orchestrated it, including the possibility of the Rwandan government itself. 

In several reviews of the film, critics, while overall tending to praise the film and Weaver's performance, often bemoan the lack of emotional depth into which the actress is allowed to dive. Specifically, many have cited the fact that Fossey's "mental state" was more precarious than depicted in the film. She was rumored to have detained poachers she "caught," having beaten one of them in the genitals with burning nettle leaves. Yikes. I think it's hard to say if this sort of gentler take on Fossey was a super deliberate choice in the script, or a combination of that and both the directing and choices from Weaver. I speculate as to how Meryl may have influenced all of that, for the betterment of the picture, of course. 

The film was a box-office success and received five Academy Award nominations, including Best Actress for Weaver, in what she has since described as her best work. It won zero. Weaver however won TWO Golden Globes that year, for Best Actress in a Drama for this film, as well as in supporting for Working Girl. I'd have to check for sure, but the only other time I can recall that happening is when Kate Winslet won for both The Reader and Revolutionary Road. It would've been a fascinating character for Meryl to interpret, nonetheless. And she would've been able to speak gorilla on screen! For real. Weaver learned, like Fossey had, to verbally communicate with real gorillas. Not too many roles these days that require that particular skill. Alas, Meryl has yet to venture beyond perfecting the delectably diverse speech patterns of homo sapiens.