The mysteries at play in The Cove, Louie Psihoyos's troubling, gripping activist documentary, begin at the surface and then, like the dolphin pods the film shows zooming around coastal Japan, go way deep.
Its first mystery is the relatively minor one that inspired Psihoyos to make the film: while attending a marine conference in Florida, Psihoyos noticed that the name of the keynote speaker, Ric O'Barry, had suddenly disappeared from the agenda. When Psihoyos found out that O'Barry, a dolphin trainer-turned-marine activist, had been banned by the conference's sponsor -- Seaworld -- because he planned on speaking about the dolphin slaughter taking place in Japan, he agreed to meet him in Taiji, a small Japanese fishing town, and see what's what.
The film moves almost directly into military mission mode, with hyper-dramatic voice-over ("We did try to do this legally..."), really slick, tension-building editing, a Hawaii 5-0 score, and at the center of it all, O'Barry himself. A grizzled Canadian badass and rogue activist, like all good Hollywood heroes, O'Barry is tormented by his shady past.
As a young man, O'Barry took a job on Flipper, the 1960s TV show starring a friendly dolphin that started the American craze for entertainment provided by marine mammals, first in water parks and then in "swim with the dolphins" schools. O'Barry trained the first dolphin (named Kathy) to perform on the television show, where they developed a strong bond. O'Barry is convinced that Kathy, tired of her life in captivity, simply committed suicide in his arms. Since then, O'Barry has traveled around the world trying to undo the damage he feels he has wrought, which is a sort of megalomaniacal take on the situation that the film ignores; the mystery of why America insists on enjoying the things it likes to the point of bloated excess -- i.e. eventually turning into an international, world-destroying industry -- also remains unsolved.
And so we come to Japan, now the leading supplier of dolphins to the marine parks that have sprouted up around the world. Taiji supplies many of these dolphins, but the question of why they routinely kill the dolphins who don't make the cut is left dangling long enough for us to develop a real hate-on for the fishermen who hide behind the forbidding natural lagoon on Taiji's coast, where the dolphins are corralled to die. Outside of a Bond film or old WWII propaganda reels, it's hard to think of a more villainous depiction of Japanese men: the fishermen, who are shot coming and going from the slaughter, sneer at and bully the Americans, cigarette dangling. Even the politesse of the undercover fuzz following the men everywhere seems bumbling, and the Japanese delegate to the International Whaling Commission is portrayed as a conniving, slippery agent of corruption.
Of course, the Americans respond to this many-layered Asian wickedness like heroes, like soldiers -- although they quickly realize it's going to take more than heroism to expose Taiji's dolphin slaughter and its satellite repercussions. It's going to take money, back-up, and military cameras.
Though the dolphin meat, itself tainted with mercury to the point of toxicity, is sold in Japan (allegedly often mislabeled), the fisherman insist it is not a matter of money. Killing dolphins is part of their culture, and also part of a government mandate of "pest control." A more specious answer is given to the "Why do they do it?" question later in the film, when it is suggested that the Japanese government, burned by whaling embargoes of the '80s, is simply being stubborn, killing its dolphin stores out of spite or "misplaced national pride," tired of being told what to do by international bodies.
There are several arguments made in that speculative vein -- another being O'Barry's theory that dolphins have not just high animal intelligence but a consciousness that borders on human, and that is why their slaughter means more than that of, say, cows or chickens -- seeded within a film that races along with the craft and compulsion of a great heist caper. Together these questions form the film's most inadvertent mystery: How much of this should we believe? As a piece of propaganda, The Cove is brilliant; as a story of ingenuity and triumph over what seems like senseless brutality, it is exceptionally well-told; but as a conscientious overview of a complex and deeply fraught, layered issue, it invokes the same phrase as even the most well-intentioned, impassioned activist docs: Buyer beware.