‘Tiger King’ Director’s HBO Animal Ownership Doc

Honestly, your guess is as good as mine why this summer has been so littered with monkeys and apes, going back to Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes in May, stretching through the second season of Hulu’s Hit-Monkey and into the August rush of Apple TV+’s Bad Monkey, Netflix’s Secret Lives of Orangutans and now HBO‘s Chimp Crazy.

Is there a sense that we’re on the brink of post-apocalyptic decay and we’re prepping for new simian overlords? Did the protracted anxiety of last summer’s dual entertainment industry strikes leave creatives feeling generally dehumanized? Or is it less specific and more general? Are monkeys just too cute for words and do we just want to get squishy with their adorable little almost-human faces and dress them up in cute outfits and take them out to the grocery store in strollers and make one into an emotional support monkey just like in the movie Monkey Shines, which I’ve only watched 10 minutes of, so it seems like a good idea that couldn’t possibly go wrong?

With the disclaimer that capuchins actually can be trained as helper monkeys for the physically disabled and, as such, can offer a service, if the rest of that last sentence rang true to you on any level — guilty as charged, I’m afraid — you may want to approach Eric Goode‘s four-hour documentary Chimp Crazy with trepidation. Or, rather, with openness to learning something.

Much more so than in his breakout Tiger King, Goode is able to build out a clearly articulated thesis in Chimp Crazy — namely that private, domestic ownership of chimpanzees is a bad thing and should be regulated on a federal level for the good of both the chimpanzees and their owners, who are rarely prepared for the risks inherent in thinking you can domesticate animals that are often very large, very strong and very much not identical to humans in their behaviors.

On Tiger King, Goode presumably got distracted because following the wild exploits of Joe Exotic, Carole Baskin and the gang became too enticing to concentrate on any clearly delivered message. The wildness, of course, is why Tiger King became a mammoth hit — that, and the whole “global pandemic” thing that put the world in lockdown at precisely the moment the series launched. That (the mammoth-ness, though hopefully not the pandemic) is unlikely to happen with Chimp Crazy. Though it has a few outlandish characters treated with some of the same gawking condescension Goode brought to Tiger King, it lacks enough narrative propulsion to carry through even these four hours, much less to spawn a sequel or an awful scripted recounting.

So Chimp Crazy is at once better and worse than Tiger King. I was only occasionally gripped while watching it, but I was left feeling only slightly dirty and not wholly unclean after the experience.

At the center of Chimp Crazy is Tonia Haddix, 50-something animal broker and, as we meet her, full-time caretaker to a menagerie of chimpanzees in Missouri, which is the Wild West of exotic animal ownership. The facility, which includes prolific Hallmark model-chimp Connor, has a wide assortment of animals. Tonia is closest to Tonka, who had a run as featured simian in movies including Babe: Pig in the City, George of the Jungle and Buddy.

“Tonka and I just found each other and Tonka loved me as much as I loved Tonka. It was meant to be. It was just natural. It’s like your love for God,” Tonia explains.

Oh.

This is how Tonia talks when she isn’t unable to talk because she’s having filler injected into her lips. Tonia loves chimpanzees and she loves pink things and she loves cosmetic procedures. Chimp Crazy loves shooting Tonia while she’s right in the middle of one of those procedures or eating a pink frosted donut or against any lurid backdrop. If you’re feeling generous, you’d say that it’s an example of the show wanting to capture Tonia in her natural habitat. If you’re not being generous, you’d say that it’s because the filmmakers get off on making Tonia look somewhere between tacky and grotesque at every turn. I think it’s a little of the former and a lot of the latter.

I said “filmmakers” there, rather than Goode, because authorship in Chimp Crazy is intentionally blurry. After Tiger King came out, Goode became a bit of a celebrity and a bit of a persona non grata in the world of exotic animal ownership — filming your subjects in a way that makes them targets for ridicule AND law enforcement will do that — so in order to get close to Tonia, Goode hired Dwayne, a so-called “proxy director,” as his intermediary. Dwayne, a trained circus clown by trade, is also the most reasonable person in the series.

Chimp Crazy, then, is a documentary whose access is based completely on a lie, but it’s also a documentary that’s about documentary ethics, especially about when witnessing crosses the line into a responsibility to intervene. There really are serious conversations to be had about when it might be incumbent on a documentarian to narc to law enforcement on their subjects — some filmmakers would absolutely say “never” — and an Eric Goode/Andrew Jarecki (The Jinx) conversation on the topic would be a pip. Goode feels bad about a lot of what he’s doing here, and puts his internal agony on-camera in ways, as with much of the show, that I wish were a bit more enlightening.

See, PETA has had its eye on the Missouri sanctuary and on Tonia, and things become increasingly tense over the course of the series, first in the court of law and then with more forceful measures. I’m not saying Carole Baskin was some lovably antagonistic figure, but she was interesting television; in contrast, PETA’s public-facing adversaries, for purposes of Chimp Crazy, are a pair of supercilious attorneys. Goode looks down his nose at them and they look down their nose at Tonia, but in that particular PETA way where even if you’re confident they’re in the right, they’re hard to warm to. Fortunately, it’s easy to warm to Traitors host Alan Cumming, who starred with Tonka in Buddy and developed what he feels was a real bond. So he appears in the documentary as a PETA ally, even if his flowery affection sounds an awful lot like Tonia.

Unlike in Tiger King, where there was barely a hint of empathy to be found, Goode seeks to come to some understanding of Tonia. Her need to be a caretaker is pathological but sad and, in some instances, comprehensible. Tonia’s son Justin, who has made peace with having a mother who notes without hesitation that her relationship with Tonka and other chimps is more important than her relationship with her own children, says of the creatures, “They’re like children who never grow up.” I mean … they’re not like that. At all, really. But that’s absolutely how the chimp owners all view their “humanzees” (not my portmanteau).

It’s a wild degree of anthropomorphizing, but it comes from a place that Goode is able to identify as human. And it isn’t like both sides aren’t ascribing their own mortality and emotions to animals who can’t speak for themselves. One side just happens to want to feed chimps chicken nuggets and talk about watching them masturbate and the other wants to let them roam in outdoor habitats.

Now, is what is on display here actual empathy (for the humans), is it condescending sympathy or is it straight-up touristic pity? Any of the three represents a big improvement over the leering both-sides mockery of Tiger King, but they’re still gradations and the most positive — actual compassion — is the hardest to come by over these four hours.

The documentary tries to show where Tonia is myopic. Intercut with the primary story are several recent chronicles of chimp ownership gone bad, each starting from a different ostensibly benign place and each ending — spoiler alert — with bloodshed. So when Tonia says, “I would give my life for him. And that’s exactly what I did, to be honest,” you’re aware that there’s the possibility of more literal life-giving that Tonia is oblivious to.

The tragic side stories, in which you know something awful is going to happen but you may not necessarily be able to predict the nature of the awful thing, are actually better presented than the main Tonia/Tonka/PETA/Alan Cumming story. They’re less sensationalistic, more even-handed and boast more persuasive perspectives on the mistakes of chimpanzee ownership. You never feel a filmmakers’ finger on the scale in the same way and you don’t need the moralizing from PETA. The point is simply, and non-voyeuristically, made. It’s a hint of what Chimp Crazy could be.