Special Ops team with dolphin prop.

Louie Psihoyos’s agitprop documentary, The Cove, about the brutal practice of dolphin hunting in Japan’s Tajii inlet, won the Audience Award at this year’s Sundance festival, and it certainly has its appeal as passionate muckraking. But that very passion ultimately limits the film from being either balanced journalism or a deep consideration of its on-camera subjects (at least the human ones).

The world’s biggest supplier of dolphins–living ones for aqua theme parks and dead ones for mercury-filled meat–this Japanese cove is heavily guarded and has never been filmed. That gives Psihoyos his central plot: follow a group of gung-ho activists as they join forces with Hollywood special-effects gurus to secretly film the kind of horrific mass dolphin slaughter that Japanese functionaries have tried to downplay.

Psihoyos has a great central character in Richard O’Barry, the dolphin trainer who made a mint while working on the Flipper TV series, then grew to rue his role in the fetishization of the sea creature that led to its exploitation. O’Barry leads the team with the restlessness of a reverse Ahab , as it tries to expose the blood-streamed waters of the cove to the world.

Unfortunately, Psihoyos never really stops to examine the obsessive O’Barry in depth. Errol Morris or Werner Herzog would have stayed on him forever, looking for the source of the bottomless reservoir of energy that fuels his mania. But this is a cause-oriented doc, so we never get to know the man beneath the wetsuit. And because the movie so wants to underscore the heinousness of those who participate in the dolphin trade, only the most dishonest, clueless Japanese officials are trotted out to serve as evil counterpoints to our activist white knights. So there goes any semblance of objectivity.

The senseless slaughter of the dolphins should absolutely stop and perhaps this documentary will play some part in that process. But as easy as it is to see its great intentions,  it ‘s just as difficult to see it as a great film.

The official site of The Cove.