Elephants are magnificent creatures, possessed of great intelligence and sensitivity, so it's little wonder that people who regularly work with or care for them become devoted. That's mostly a good thing, particularly for elephants who've been transplanted far from home: If you're a 10,000-pound African elephant living 8,000 miles away from your native habitat, you need all the help you can get. Still, these marvelous animals are strangers among us, and understanding them isn't easy. How much human love is too much for an elephant? That's the question Lisa Leeman's One Lucky Elephant attempts to answer, without sentimentality but with the right amount of compassion.
St. Louis-based circus producer David Balding adopted Flora, an orphaned baby African elephant, in the mid-1980s. Flora was a popular attraction at Balding's circus -- he even named it after her, Circus Flora -- but around the time she reached 16 years of age, Balding noticed she seemed to take less pleasure in performing. Knowing she would live another 30 or 40 years, and would of course outlive him, he began hunting for a suitable environment where he could send her to retire. He preferred not to place her in a zoo; the exception would have been the exceedingly elephant-friendly Pittsburgh Zoo, which had no room for her. He placed her temporarily at the Miami Metro Zoo, where she attacked a new trainer (fortunately, not fatally). Balding's best hope was to send her to an elephant sanctuary in Tennessee, run by a no-nonsense elephant enthusiast named Carol Buckley, but at the time, Buckley was accepting only Indian elephants, animals who follow different codes of behavior. An African elephant's idea of playful behavior, Buckley explains on-camera, is perceived as aggression by an Indian elephant.
One Lucky Elephant covers Balding's odyssey of finding a home for Flora, but more significantly, it's a tender -- though never treacly -- examination of his own reluctance to let her go. At one point Balding's wife, who half-jokingly refers to herself as "the other woman" in Flora's eyes, says matter-of-factly, "She needed to be an elephant -- not a dog or a daughter." Balding is a rotund, jovial-looking guy who nonetheless seems more comfortable with his wrinkled gray charge than with most people. He's a little awkward in front of the camera; some of his dialogue feels canned or rehearsed. But he's perfectly natural when he's leaning against his mighty elephantine mistress, allowing her trunk to curl inquisitively around his arm or enjoying the way she blows little puffs of air at him through her snout.
Leeman is sympathetic to Balding's emotional attachment, but her movie doesn't give him a free pass. Even captive elephants who are treated well are subject to dominance training, as Flora was, and while it can be done without cruelty, there's no denying that it's an attempt to break an animal's pure animal nature (to the extent that that's even possible). In some places, though, Leeman just isn't clear enough about some of the missteps that were made in Flora's resettlement. Certain details and chronologies are fudged or glossed over. Why, for instance, was Flora's trainer -- a fellow named Raoul, who disappears midway through the narrative -- allowed to use her as the centerpiece of a scheme in which civilians could pay to study an elephant up-close and personal? A participant was seriously injured when Flora, seized by a mysterious temper tantrum, wrapped her trunk around the woman and repeatedly banged her against a tree. (Apparently, this happed after Flora had injured the Miami zoo trainer, though the sequence of events isn't quite clear.) Balding claims he didn't know about Raoul's scheme -- and he probably didn't -- but his professed ignorance of the situation begs the question: If a 10,000-pound creature with occasional anger-management issues is in your care, shouldn't you know what she's up to at all times?
But Leeman isn't out to assign blame, and although One Lucky Elephant isn't needlessly harrowing (I'd say it's perfectly suitable for kids around eight or older), its chief focus is impossibility of completely erasing the attachments -- and the co-dependency --that can thrive between man and beast. Balding admits that he wishes he'd adopted the other baby elephant who'd been brought over from Africa with Flora; elephants are social creatures, and do much better in the company of others of their kind.
And looking at Flora here -- with those Maybelline-lashed eyes, those majestic flapping ears, their near-translucent edges resembling sheets of Play-Doh rolled too thin -- you can't help but want the best for her. In a perfect world, she would have lived a proper elephant's life in the wild, in the company of her own friends and family (and, of course, safe from the real-world horror of poachers). As it's turned out, Flora has had a relatively good life for a wild animal in captivity. But as Leeman frames it, the question of where she truly belongs isn't even one that needs to be asked. In One Lucky Elephant, lots of human beings lay out theories and suppositions about what Flora must be thinking and feeling. But her deepest elephant mysteries are locked forever inside her; to love her is not necessarily to know her.
One Lucky Elephant opens today in New York City.