A Scientist at the Movies Reviews by Greg Paris

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Title: Instinct

Date Viewed: 6/6/99

Details:

Anthony Hopkins

Cuba Gooding, Jr.

Donald Sutherland

George Dzundza

Maura Tierney

John Ashton

Score: Danny Elfman

Script: Gerald DiPego

Director: Jon Turteltaub

Score: +

The Review: I was predisposed to like Instinct. Excellent actors; an interest in animal communication; familiarity with the work of Dian Fossey and Jane Goddall; a niggling awareness of continuing political friction in association with the African mountain gorilla. So it should be no surprise that I was intrigued by the result -- many other reviews to the contrary. Well constructed, partially in flashback, the movie covers the distance between medical school ambition and peace in the African rainforests, between someone who has lost what he treasured and one who has not yet discovered what to love.

Anthony Hopkins plays an respected academic primatologist who disappears while doing field work, and is repatriated years later from Rwanda after his imprisonment there for murder. Donald Sutherland and Cuba Gooding Jr. are comfortable in a mentor/student relationship at a Florida teaching hospital, to which is assigned the task of determining whether Hopkins is fit to stand trial. Gooding, an up and coming resident with a demonstrated talent at working with difficult patients, actively seeks the assignment to make the psychiatric evaluation.

The movie is a character study of teacher and student, set against the backdrop of a maximum security ward for marginal psychiatric cases. Hopkins paints a variant of human history in which the "takers" exert an ever increasing dominion. Based in small part, and very loosely, on Daniel Quinn's book Ishmael -- it carries the same, occasionally preachy, tone and is the origin of the terms "leavers" and "takers."

Not so subtly buried, there is an additional message to the wage slaves among us. It's not a profound revelation, but a clear one nonetheless. When Gooding's character explains his frustration -- "It's not the work, I've always loved the work; it's the game!" -- there will be a strong resonance with some in the audience, and this will be all the stronger the longer you have been embedded in any hierarchically suppressive system. Gooding's education and rebellion is good to watch.

Supporting roles are OK: Maura Tierney as Hopkins' daughter; George Dzundza as the prison's resident psychiatrist. John Ashton is (suitably) annoying as a sadistic prison guard with a hair-trigger temper -- quite a change from his role in Beverly Hills Cop (I and II).

Good wildlife photography by Thomas Mangelsen scattered throughout, and an average score by Danny Elfman. Recommended; catalytic.

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