To reproduce, the emperor penguins of Antarctica march across miles and miles of ice. Now the tuxedoed, utterly dedicated parents have become the stars of a hot documentary.
Luc Jacquet’s “March of the Penguins” owns the No.2 spot in all-time domestic box office for a documentary. Since its June 24 release, the charmer has grossed $37.7 million.
It’s playing on more screens than any documentary in history – more than 2,100. Yes, that includes reigning box office behemoth “Fahrenheit 9/11.”
While it may be the most persuasive example yet, “March of the Penguins” isn’t the only proof that moviegoers are answering the call of the wild, seeking fresh meaning about their own lives in the tales of some of Earth’s other inhabitants.
Is it any wonder in a world seemingly gone mad, that these inventive, often stunning, always complex (even when they unfold with elegant simplicity) documentaries provide a respite from the muck we’ve made?
Look at the box office chart for documentaries and you’ll find “Winged Migration” (No.5), “Touching the Void” (No.12) and “The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill” (No.24) holding their own amid the political, the kid-filled and the incendiary.
Not that Denver audiences needed box-office confirmation, says Landmark Theatres’ city manager David Kimball.
“Coloradans love the allure of the great outdoors,” he said, “and ‘Penguins’ and ‘Winged Migration’ and even ‘Wild Parrots’ were successful for us. ‘Touching the Void’ was huge in this area.” Kimball sees this trend as part of the surge in quality documentaries that began in 2003.
“There’s a growing appreciation for good documentary,” he said. “We’re seeing new audiences coming into the theater that have perhaps never been here before. They know we’re showing ‘The Aristocrats’ but that’s not where the parents are going with the kiddos.”
Not that all nature documentaries are kid-friendly: Miramax’s “Deep Blue” (which didn’t open in Denver) has enough animal-planet carnage to fill a seashore snuff film.
Our appreciation for films about the natural world is not a brand-new development.
“People have always been fascinated by nature docs,” said Brandon Gray, president and publisher of boxofficemojo.com, an online movie publication and box office tracking service.
Besides a storied television history that includes Jacques Cousteau, National Geographic specials, and “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom,” nature documentaries now have their own cable channels.
“They’ve been the bread and butter for IMAX,” said Gray. “It’s almost like regular theaters have caught up to what IMAX has been doing. There’s a universal appeal. It’s not a highfalutin or esoteric narrative.”
But no one should underestimate the artistic ambitions or the existential power of these recent films.
As lovely as the bright green, cherry-crowned parrots are in “Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill,” Mark Bittner, the formerly homeless man who becomes the flock’s bearded Boswell, is the wildest character on screen.
“Several people have told us they were dragged kicking and screaming to this ‘nature doc’ and loved it because it was much more than that,” wrote “Parrots” director Judy Irving in an e-mail. “To me, the dharma-bum search, and Mark’s finding his way via the wild flock, is the heart of the film.” (Irving and Bittner became a couple.)
“In terms of ‘nature docs,’ I definitely knew what I didn’t want it to be,” Irving said. She wanted to avoid “that somnambulant public television documentary that just helps you go to sleep at night, sort of like a baseball game.”
Jewell Palovak, a co-producer on “Grizzly Man,” thinks audiences want to “see something real.”
Director Werner Herzog’s astounding documentary mixes interviews with footage that bear advocate Timothy Treadwell shot during five of his 13 summers in Alaska’s wilderness observing grizzlies. One of the bears killed and devoured Treadwell and a companion in October 2003.
“When you see ‘Grizzly Man’ you know it’s pretty much real,” Pavolak said. But the documentary’s reality doesn’t come merely from the powerful footage Treadwell made of himself with the bears. It comes from Herzog’s masterful arguments about humans seeking our meaning in the stories of others, even if those others are animals.
Of course, even when humans are nowhere to be found onscreen, we still leave our footprints.
“We humans are able to meditate on a stone and find meaning it,” said Adam Leipzig, president of National Geographic Feature Films. “The way we find meaning for ourselves in our lives is by experiencing the external world and seeing how it relates to us.”
It seems everyone affiliated with the English-language version of “Penguins” knew that it would be far too easy to anthropomorphize their non-human leads.
“We were all balancing that topic,” said Alex Wurman, who composed the lush and moving score of “Penguins.” “I was dangerously headed toward a more emotional bent. Maybe it’s because I have a 4-year-old boy running around. But they let me run with that whole inspiration, balancing it really well with the amount of anthropomorphizing that they put into the script and how much they took out of it.”
At one point in Morgan Freeman’s sonorous narration (written by Jordan Roberts) the penguins’ jaw-dropping dedication is characterized as “love.” It’s a word that appears to romanticize the emperor penguins’ centuries-old call to reproduce.
“We never say what the penguins are thinking,” said Leipzig. “At the same time, yes, we use the word ‘love.”‘
He believes the question becomes, “What does love mean? If love means extraordinary commitment, well, these penguins are the most committed parents on the planet. If love means something else, perhaps it’s open to interpretation,” he said.
“It’s certainly possible to look at a movie like ‘March of the Penguins’ and say ‘Boy, those penguins are so much like us.”‘
For Leipzig, the more intriguing question is one that might be be at the heart of so these nature documentaries:
“How much are we like them?”
Film critic Lisa Kennedy can be reached at 303-820-1567 or lkennedy@denverpost.com.
