I’m amazed by how many people deride the documentary, equating it with countless dull television features. Yet the modern documentary – I use that label because this feels like a relatively recent development – can be as gripping and revelatory as the best ‘regular’ film. Such documentaries use all the structural, narrative and characterization arts of dramas. Witness Man on Wire, as moving and as exciting as any thriller.
The Cove, made by renowned wildlife photographer Louis Psihoyos, could have been a typical cable TV eco doco about a ‘plan to save the dolphins.’ Instead Psihoyos employs an adroit narrative that jumps from interviews to back story to as-it-happens footage. The plot is sweet: Ric O’Barry, the original trainer of Flipper and now a campaigner to save dolphins, enlists help to try and find out what happens to his beloved creatures in a sealed-off cove in the tiny Japanese coastal town of Taiji. Eco commandos, expert at infiltration, scuba diving and surveillance techniques, join the quest, and the drama switches to the covert operation in Taiji. O’Barry is a charismatic lead but the chief driver of this riveting film is Psihoyos’s brilliant direction. What the intrepid adventurers find is shocking, but the impact is trebled by The Cove’s filmic mastery.