It's a confusing week for people who care what's real and what is not under the rubric of "documentary."
On one hand, you've got the paper-light Paper Heart, in which Charlyne Yi tells a real-looking fake story about her relationship with Michael Cera.
On the other, you've got the astonishing dolphin-massacre expose The Cove, one of the most important eco-documentaries ever made -- a real story that almost looks fake for being so "Mission Impossible-esque."
Indeed, some of the trailers deliberately downplay the doc part, concentrating so heavily on black-clad operatives with high-tech night-vision, you expect Tom Cruise or Matt Damon to pop up any second.
But the only Hollywood face in this fantastical story is Heroes' "It" girl Hayden Panettiere, who is shown being arrested on the water after cutting loose some dolphins with fellow demonstrators from the Sea Shepherd in an ultimately futile protest.
The Cove, as an interesting sidepiece to its amazing story, offers an alternative approach to the "go in, save a few whales, get arrested" approach of Paul Watson and company. It's called "get hardcore evidence and fry the bad guys in the court of public opinion."
A windchange in the nature of protest, The Cove is a true work of passion which, the faint-hearted should be warned, serves up a stark image of an almost unimaginable cetacean killing field in Japan that turns acres of sea to blood red.
The key players are director, longtime photographer and activist Louis Psihoyos and Rick O'Barry -- best known as the guy who trained all the dolphins in Flipper (he actually lived in the house in the show). Like Saul on the road to Damascus, his is a true conversion. He's seemingly haunted by the part of his life that first made him famous.
The target: Taiji, a secretive town in Japan whose "respectable" industry is the relatively humane practice of trapping live dolphins for shipment to Sea Worlds around the world (they generate $150,000 in revenue each).
The ones that don't make the cut, however, fetch a mere $600 as meat -- and shady meat at that (it turns out to be marketed as whale meat throughout Japan, and when tested is found to contain alarming levels of mercury).
There's some humour in the mordant undertaking -- their chief antagonist is a government functionary they nickname Private Space (these being the only two English words he apparently knows), and the dramatics are ladled a little thick (it seems every foray in the dark is punctuated by thermal images of police showing up, forcing everybody to finish up and split).
Away from Taiji, The Cove performs a useful function showing the farcical side of the International Whaling Commission. Its officials, based in landlocked countries and tiny Caribbean island nations where no one has ever seen a whale, are bribed by the Japanese into backing their interminable efforts to rescind the ban on commercial whaling (seems they've bounced back in 20 years). Money practically changes hands in front of your eyes in these scenes, so transparent is the cynical politics.
The Cove is advocacy filmmaking at its best, a project whose success will not be measured in box-office dollars, but by the waves it creates.
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