Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s documentary about a killer whale and the park that kept him is as tense as any thriller and makes its case almost too well. It is one-sided, partly by necessity, and Jeff Beal’s score keeps telling us what the footage has already shown.
Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s Blackfish has one argument and makes it in 83 minutes: killer whales should not be kept in tanks, and the company that keeps them knew what it was risking and told its customers otherwise. It uses the story of one whale, Tilikum, and the people who spent their working lives a few feet from him. It is effective. It is also a film that has decided what you will think before you sit down, and it does not trouble to hide that. We believe it is right, which is not quite the same as believing it is fair.
Most of what you see was not shot for this film. Christopher Towey and Jonathan Ingalls film the interviews plainly, former trainers at kitchen tables and against grey walls, a researcher on a dock, and their work is the least of it. The film is made from other people’s tape: home video shot from the stands, the park’s own promotional reels, local news, court depositions, and a few pieces of security footage that nobody expected the public to see. Eli Despres and Cowperthwaite cut this material like a thriller. Each incident is built slowly, in pieces, with the outcome held back to the last possible moment. It works, and by the third time it works we had started to notice the method.
The trainers carry the case. Samantha Berg, John Hargrove, Jeffrey Ventre, Carol Ray, John Jett and Dean Gomersall all worked at the park, and they describe being hired for their swimming and their personalities and taught almost nothing about the animals in front of them. They are not bitter, or not mainly. They loved the whales and say so, and the shame in the room is that they kept performing after what they knew. Ken Balcomb, who has watched wild orcas for decades, provides the comparison: families that stay together for life, in open water, with dialects of their own. Dave Duffus, the researcher who gave evidence for the American safety regulator after the 2010 death, is the calmest person in the film and the most damaging to the park, because all he does is describe procedures.
There is one sequence we have not been able to shake. A trainer in a wetsuit is taken by the foot to the bottom of a pool, held there, brought up, and taken down again, for minutes, while his colleagues stand at the edge doing what they can, which is nothing. What frightened us was not the whale but the man’s face each time he surfaced: composed, breathing, waiting for the next one. We watched it with a hand over our mouth. Later, a former trainer describes the day a calf was moved to another park and her mother stayed in a corner of the pool making a sound nobody there had heard before. It is a plain account of something that cannot be shown, and it did more to us than any of the footage.
The film’s weaknesses are all of the same kind. Jeff Beal’s score is low strings and a hum, and it sits under nearly everything, insisting that what we are watching is terrible when the pictures have already made that clear. A silence would have done more. When an interviewee’s voice catches, the camera stays, and the cut waits for the tear. A scientist puts up a scan of an orca brain and points to a region; the film moves on before we are told what the evidence is. The park declined to take part, as an end card says, and Mark Simmons, the one former trainer who leans towards defending it, is on screen for a minute or two. The argument would have survived hearing the other side at greater length. It might have been stronger for it.
Set against other single-issue documentaries, this is a sharper piece of work than most, and the reason is the archive. The park filmed itself constantly, and the film’s best moments are its own reels: a smiling employee assures a family that a collapsed dorsal fin is common in the wild, and that whales live longer in the park than in the ocean, and then Balcomb says otherwise. We found ourselves laughing at the first claim and angry by the second.
Certificate 15, and the certificate is earned by what happens to people rather than to animals. Watch it with the sound a little lower than usual; the pictures are enough.
