Project NIM was about a chimpanzee who could communicate through sign language, except that the movie wasn’t about the experiment, it was about the monkey. It was one of the most amazingly tragic stories I’ve ever heard.

When he was just two weeks old, Nim was taken from his mother by Herb Terrace, a linguist who wanted to test the idea that only humans have the capacity to learn and use language. Terrace thought that if Nim were raised as a human child he would acquire language the way humans do, so he got a volunteer mother to take Nim into her home, where he lived for several months. Nim had all the freedom that the rest of the children in the family did, but he wasn’t exposed much to sign language because nobody in the family knew many signs, so Terrace eventually took Nim to live in a country house owned by the university.

Terrace hired several teaching assistants to look after Nim on the estate and teach him sign language. The chimp seemed to be having a wonderful time there, but didn’t care much for the experimental part of the project. Whenever they took him to the university classroom where they tried to document his use of sign, he got bored and asked to go to the bathroom all the time. That right there is evidence of a pretty shrewd use of language, if you ask me.

The project was winding down right about the time Nim was five years old. He’d never seen a chimpanzee in his life, except for the two weeks that he was with his mother right after he was born. He’d been raised as human babies are raised, treated to the friendship of humans who sincerely loved him and treated him as a companion. When the project came to an end, Terrace returned Nim to the monkey farm he came from. Needless to say, it was a little hard for Nim to cope with the transition.

Lucky for him, one of the handlers at the farm was very sympathetic, took Nim out of his cage and played with him as often as possible. Also, they smoked weed. Everybody in this movie seemed to be a pot-smoking hippie, now that I think of it. They played with Nim, they talked to Nim, and when they had a little party I suppose it was only natural that they passed the joint to Nim. He even knew a sign for it.

How does a monkey’s life go from bad to worse? Just like this: The monkey farm fell on hard financial times and had to sell off a bunch of the monkeys for medical experiments. Nim and a few others were sent to a government lab that tested vaccines on chimpanzees. Nim’s buddy at the farm raise hell in the press and eventually got the attention of Cleveland Amory, who brought Nim to a ranch where he kept horses that had been abused, but Nim was alone there.

The happy ending for Nim, if it’s possible to be happy after such a life, came when the government science lab was eventually shut down. The medical experiments they carried out there were deemed to be too gruesome and the chimps were all sent to farms. Bob’s buddy managed to get two of them transferred to the ranch with Nim and looked after them as best he could.

I went on way too long with that, but it was quite an effective movie. Well worth running six blocks to see.