Mark Reviews Movies: GIGI & NATE

Gigi & Nate, Roadside Attractions

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 1, 2022

Gigi & Nate doesn't quite work as an inspiring story, but it's even worse as a story with a very specific message to make. The message has to do with accessibility for people with disabilities, which is undoubtedly a fine, noble, and vital statement to make. David Hudgins' screenplay, though, isn't about that in a broad and straightforward way. The movie is very particular about the kind of accessibility it's championing, and even Hudgins and director Nick Hamm seem uncertain about their own argumentation.

The story has to do with the relationship between a young man, who becomes mostly paralyzed after a battle with a severe bacterial infection, and his service animal. That animal isn't a dog, as one would guess to be the case with some level of certainty, but a capuchin monkey.

You almost certainly know the species, since their cute and expressive appearance means they've been in plenty of movies and TV shows over the decades. Because the government changed the Americans with Disabilities Act to exclude primates like monkeys from the list of recognized service animals, one imagines the movie was made, not because of some current real-life inspiration, but because, yes, the monkey in the spotlight is pretty cute and expressive.

Hudgins and Hamm do eventually present this material as something of a piece of activism, which is a mistake, because it doesn't work even by the movie's own logic (and especially knowing that its case has already been determined more than a decade before the movie's release, anyway). As the isolated story of a man and his monkey working together to form a bond that benefits them both, it's about as sappy as such a tale might sound, but at least it's innocent and occasionally sweet. When the filmmakers try to make the material about something bigger than itself, though, it simply falls flat, becoming disingenuous and completely ineffective.

A lot of time is spent in a prologue that details how Nate (Charlie Rowe) becomes quadriplegic, as a holiday weekend at his family's vacation home in North Carolina turns into a medical nightmare. Nate jumps from a high point into a pond, where the impact pushes an unseen danger into his body through the nostrils. He's soon feverish and rendered barely conscious by meningitis, leaving his family—mother Claire (Marcia Gay Harden), father Dan (Jim Belushi), sisters Katy (Josephine Langford) and Annabelle (Hannah Riley), and grandmother (played by Diane Ladd)— to wait for news in the hospital.

Four years later back home in Tennessee, Nate is quadriplegic, confined to a wheelchair, and, in that unfortunate way so many movies define people with disabilities, suicidal. After her son's attempt to drown himself, Claire decides to move forward on Nate's biggest wish (one that's only established, by the way, in the moment when it comes true): to get a helper monkey. Despite some pushback from a couple family members and the monkey's early hesitation, Nate and Gigi, the monkey, eventually bond, with the monkey helping the man with picking up things, physical therapy, and socializing—such as when he re-unites with Lori (Zoe Margaret Colletti), who just happens to have been there on the fateful day and moved here for college.

The rest of that story is mostly predictable, as Nate's mood improves and Gigi becomes like a friend, and fairly unconvincing, since most of the actual help provided by Gigi is portrayed by way of a computer-generated version of the monkey. It's strange that the filmmakers don't realize how this technique, whether for the benefit of the monkey or the human co-stars, wholly undermines its case that capuchins can and should be used in such ways, when the movie itself isn't comfortable with or capable of having a real monkey in a noticeable number of scenes.

As the big complication, it's just as predictable as the relationship. An animal rights group, led by Chloe (Welker White), learns about Nate and Gigi, and they take the case that the monkey shouldn't be used as a servant right to the state capitol. Their argument is that capuchins are too intelligent and wild to be used in such a way, and Nate's counterpoint is that Gigi is too smart not to be used in such a way. Yes, it is odd that our protagonist's big, climactic speech sounds a lot like he's making the antagonist's argument, but here we are.

The movie does contradict itself frequently, from that speech to the considerable use of a digital monkey. That's to be expected, perhaps, because Gigi & Nate simply isn't equipped to be a message movie—no matter how badly it wants to be one.

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