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March of the Penguins
They appear in the far distance, almost insignificant blobs of ink on an all-consuming canvas of white, icy desolation. For a moment, they look almost human as their tiny figures walk through the barren wasteland, and this realization is the first remarkable moment, of many, in Luc Jacquet’s unforgettable debut documentary March of the Penguins. It is a film consisting of breathtaking image after breathtaking image, wrapped around a story that surprises us with how much we eventually care about what happens to its inhabitants. On a similar note, I have recently revisited the works of Werner Herzog, a filmmaker who I am on the verge of considering the greatest living director. He makes his films, he claims, because he wants to give us new, original images that we have never seen before. According to Herzog, this is the only way to keep our society from dying. In light of Herzog's conviction, March of the Penguins is the kind of movie that will keep us alive. The film concerns—and documents in painstaking detail—the nine months that emperor penguins spend breeding, laying eggs, and preparing their freshly-hatched young for independence. Every significant event in this cycle—the long walk across plains of ice to the breeding grounds, the selection of an annual mate, the laying of eggs, the gathering for food, the hatchings, the harsh weather conditions, etc.—is accounted for and narrated with dignity and warmth by Morgan Freeman. For most of the film’s running time, the male and females take turns looking after the eggs/newborns while the other marches seventy-plus miles across the ice to the ocean to gather food. The monotony is potentially maddening, yet Jacquet and cinematographers Laurent Chalet and Jérôme Maison edit the film so that it generates the suspense of a survival picture, utilizing tantalizing images of gigantic herds of penguins huddled together, their warmth enabling them to survive the harsh cold. Critics of the film complain that hardly any factual information about the penguins is given. I wonder how much of this information we could retain anyway as we dwell upon the magnificent images of nature and its survivors. The ecology and factual data behind these events could have potentially been interesting, but for me, had the entire film been a voiceless exercise, simply showcasing these splendid creatures’ march to and fro the ocean, it would have been sufficient. This is not a film about ecological facts. It is not even a narrative film “about love and family,” as Freeman’s narration insists. It is a film about its images, and Jacquet has given us some of the most memorable, moving pictures centered on nature that I have ever seen. Only Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams, which concerned Werner Herzog’s obsessive battle with the Peruvian jungle to make his epic Fitzcarraldo, moved me more, yet I say that acknowledging that Blank’s film gave us human faces to relate to and root for. Jacquet achieves something even more startling by creating the same, exhausting effect of the pain, agony, and joys of nature with no cast except for hundreds of emperor penguins, their chirps and whistles beckoning us with the same conquering triumph as Herzog’s obsessed, passionate dreams. It is appropriate that I mention both Burden of Dreams and Fitzcarraldo, because the experience that both films showcase is certainly comparable to the ordeal that Jacquet and company put themselves through to make March of the Penguins. Even Apocalypse Now looks easy next to surviving the harsh, winter storms of Antarctica for over nine months, as Jacquet and his team would have had to in order to make this film. As the winds blast and cover the ground with ice and frost, and as the penguins huddle together trying to stay warm, covered in snow and ice themselves, we have to remind ourselves that there is indeed a film crew capturing all of this. “This is one of the worst recorded winters in Antarctica,” narrator Freeman informs us. “As the cold environment drove all other animals out of this continent, the penguins, in their stubbornness, refused to flee.” Okay, but what is Jacquet’s excuse? One wonders what was going through his mind as he captured these animals and realized that even they would probably rather be somewhere else. Here is a bold filmmaker if there ever was one; he has certainly joined the ranks Coppola, Herzog, and Blank as someone literally willing to put himself through hell to capture a few moments of great cinema. He has ventured where few artists would dare, for a duration that only a madman could seriously consider. Certainly an attempt has been made to “humanize” the penguins as they take their journey. Clever editing is utilized to tell an interesting, often emotional story: After waiting in the cold for months for the females to return, the tired, hungry males are all grouped together in a sea of black and white, their heads ducked down and their bodies wobbling back and forth. All of a sudden, in the distance, the females call out, heralding their return. Jacquet shows the males’ heads all turn towards the call in unison, and the lyrics, “Oh Sweet Mystery of Life At Last I Found Thee” come to mind. In another moment, two starving penguins longing for food find a small water hole and leap into it at the same time. They get stuck, they struggle in irritation, Freeman says, “Sometimes, they get into a hurry,” and we laugh. On sadder notes, when one of the hatchlings succumbs to the cold, the mourning mother tries to take another female’s baby. “This is not permitted by the group,” Freeman explains, and the sight of about half-a-dozen penguins defending the mother from the would-be kidnapper is extraordinary. Yet March of the Penguins plays best when it simply lingers on the natural, everyday action of the penguins themselves: The long, almost single-file lines as they waddle and slide through the ice, the graceful close-ups of these creatures next to each other, their necks and beaks moving in a graceful mating dance, their plunges out and into the water to search for food, their ability to identify their spouse and child through mere, individual chirps. In one sequence, the males, as they head toward the breeding grounds, stop dead in their tracks, temporarily confused by a change in their surroundings. Then, one at a time, they start wobbling in the right direction again, their collective minds seemingly all figuring out instinctively the right way. Moments such as this are remarkable in their straightforward demonstration of these strange birds working together. There are also stupendous, underwater shots of the penguins swimming about and gathering food underneath several feet of ice, and I’m hard pressed to tell you exactly how Jacquet captured these moments. Yet he did, and the more we see them, the more we astonished we become. Nature, it seems, has a way of taking our breath away by simply being itself, and Jacquet’s ultimate achievement is his uncanny ability to make the simplicities of our world as sacred as its deepest mysteries. Narrated by Morgan Freeman. Warner Independent Pictures
and National Geographic present a film by Bonne Pioche Pictures.
Written and directed by Luc Jacquet, from his short story. Rated
G. Running time: 80 minutes. Original United States theatrical
release date: June 24, 2005. |
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