The Cove (2009)

Stars: Ric O'Barry and doomed dolphins

Director: Louie Psihoyos

Plugs: None

When we first see Ric O'Barry, the driving force behind the new documentary The Cove, he's wearing a surgeon’s mask, hunched down in the driver's seat of a car trying to mimic an elderly Japanese man and looking furtively in the rear-view mirror to see who is following him along a winding road on a Japanese coast. He comes off as a wild-eyed paranoid nutjob, talking about how he has been threatened, how his colleagues have been harassed, jailed, and even killed.

Yet, as the wags note, it’s not being paranoid if they really are after you. And they really are after O'Barry—“they” being fishermen and authorities in the small village of Taijii, a town with a dark secret. Each year dolphins are herded toward shore en masse and netted. The best ones (i.e., the bottle-nosed species) are selected to be sent off to aquariums around the world to become trained performers. The rest of them, well, instead of being released they are herded away from public view. What happens there has been long suspected but remained unproven—the telltale sign is the ocean of blood.

O'Barry is the world’s best-known dolphin trainer, and decades ago was instrumental in making the seminal TV show Flipper a success (he trained the five dolphins that portrayed Flipper). O'Barry clearly regrets his role in helping launch the public's appetite for bottle-nosed dolphins and trained cetaceans, and is trying to make up for his past.

O'Barry and other animal rights activists have long protested the dolphin killings, but government officials deny it occurs, and local fishermen's response is: prove it. This is difficult, because the killing is done in a small cove away from public eyes, guarded by razor wire, fences, and security guards. The way to stem the killings is to let the world see them, and thus the film launches into a Mission: Impossible type covert operation to film the dolphin slaughter. O'Barry and the filmmakers enlist specialized divers and Hollywood special effects wizards to come up with ways to secretly record the butchery. Sunlight is said to be the best disinfectant, and The Cove aims to shed light on the town's bloody secret.

In lesser hands, the film could easily have collapsed under an emotionally charged but ultimately unfocused pile of scenes showing dolphin gore. All killing is ugly, whether chickens, cows, or dolphins; the core of the film, to be sure, is the sickening, secretive dolphin killing that literally turns the cove bright red. But filmmaker Louie Psihoyos (a veteran National Geographic underwater photographer) instead wisely chose to cast a wider net, and looks at other aspects, including the politics of the trade in dolphins both live and dead.

The Cove is of course an advocacy film with an environmental and conservation agenda, and some may dismiss it as propaganda. But documentaries are inherently advocacy films; filmmakers don't spend months and years of their lives documenting a subject about which they are ambivalent. Any documentary will be told from one point of view, and The Cove fairly addresses the arguments for the dolphin killings. It leaves a few unanswered questions (the harm to trained dolphins in aquariums is strongly asserted but hardly proven), and you may or may not buy all of the film’s claims about dolphins—such as that they are self-aware (probably); or that they can commit suicide (doubtful).

You don't need to be an animal lover to appreciate The Cove. The dolphin slaughter is indefensible on purely economic and health grounds. It turns out that most of the dolphin meat contains toxic levels of mercury and is therefore unfit to eat anyway. The Cove is one of the best documentaries I've seen in years—dramatic, informative, engaging and enraging.