![]() Charlie Rowe is perfectly convincing and charismatic as the teenager who’s quick to leap off a cliff and then betrayed by his own body. Gigi & Nate finesses this contemporary dilemma in part by elongating the film’s first, pre-accident act, characterizing teenage Nate as a daredevil free spirit whose life is altered by a freak illness. Then there’s the matter of casting the able-bodied in the role of a disabled person. The use of CGI is far less convincing than the simple editing of Allie’s reaction shots and gestures, but it’s necessary. Aside from the difficulties of training a monkey first for service work and then for film production come other complexities, and the film relies in no small part on the CGI effects of visual artist Scott Anderson (Babe) for scenes where Allie might be endangered. ( This story seems a little closer than this one!) In 2018, Time Magazine ran a feature on the use of capuchin monkeys as service animals for people with quadriplegia and noted, presciently, “no human-monkey pair can last forever.” The Boston-based Helping Hands organization ceased placing monkeys in human homes in 2020. The film is intended, surely, to deliver its message first and foremost, but it never descends too far into the mawkish: its moments of conflict-some internal to Nate’s family dynamic, others external-feel genuine if ever-so-slightly engineered.Īlthough Gigi & Nate is touted as “inspired by a true story,” and the filmmakers reference “a book” on the topic, there’s no specific case or source noted in the credits or the film’s press materials. Fortunately, director Nick Hamm resists the temptation to sentimentalize or even much anthropomorphize Gigi (played by a trained monkey named Allie) and to keep the film’s plot moving forward with Nate’s ongoing recovery and its complications. It would be easy enough for a film like this to lapse into trite sentimentality or hoary cliché. With a plot like Gigi & Nate‘s-a melodrama based on a disabled person’s relationship with his capuchin-monkey service-animal-much could go wrong. The film presents Gaines and her fellow activists as clearly in the wrong, though whether or not monkeys benefit from this kind of service is a question that’s been asked for years. Not everyone is enamored of Gigi, in his home, in town, or on social media, where animal rights activist Chloe Gaines (Welker White) starts a campaign to remove Gigi from the Gibsons’ home, arguing first in the streets and then in the courts that monkeys like Gigi should not be kept, subservient, in humans’ homes. With her assistance, Nate finds some of the joy he’d missed since his accident, laughing, smiling, learning to play games and enjoy others’ company, until his re-entry to society is complicated by Gigi’s presence. Photo: Ann Marie Fox.Īs a service animal, Gigi helps Nate with his physical therapy as well as his emotional recovery. Charlie Rowe and Allie the Monkey in Gigi & Nate. Not everything goes swimmingly-there is something indeed of the boy-meets-monkey, boy-loses-monkey, boy-gets-monkey cliché afoot here-but it’s Gigi’s expressive eyes, lithe movements, and kind heart that win Nate (and surely many viewers) over. A capuchin monkey rescued from a petting zoo and now retrained as a service animal, Gigi changes Nate’s life, a second time and this time for the better. So Gigi & Nate is not exactly a romance, at least not in the conventional sense. ![]() She’s shy, charming, and empathetic, and she wins over Nate, inspiring him to redouble his efforts at recovery. Now quadriplegic and wheelchair-bound, Nate’s frustrations threaten to overcome him. ![]() Charlie Rowe plays Nate Gibson, a teenager celebrating the Fourth of July with a high-peak dive to impress his friends tragically, his stunt leaves him paralyzed by amoebic meningitis. “Inspired by” a true story, Gigi & Nate is one of those films that tugs so hard at your heartstrings you might feel some tiny capuchin imprints on them as the credits roll.
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