Caroline Thompson's film Buddy is about a woman who believed in the absolute domestication of animals. The story is mostly true, based on the life of New York socialite Gertrude Linz, who kept an incredible menagerie on her sprawling estate--birds, horses, show dogs, and a handful of chimpanzees. The chimps were her special project, and Linz felt that if apes were treated as human children, they would grow up with intelligence and nobility.

Rene Russo plays Gertrude Linz, in a winning and tricky performance. She plays Linz as both ebullient and slightly crazed, but ultimately determined, especially when she takes on an impossible task--raising a gorilla from infancy to adulthood. Linz names the great ape Buddy and is initially successful at forging a connection and training the animal to behave politely and helpfully. Buddy, though, can't be restrained forever, and it's not long before he starts losing touch with his affection for Linz and begins feeling the urge to run wild.

It's easy to want to like Buddy. Thompson, who wrote the script as well as directed, has her finger on a fascinating dilemma--the difficulty in maintaining a communication with another species. She backs up her story with painfully sad images. Buddy (played by a man in a gorilla suit, with facial animatronics by Jim Henson's Creature Shop) dances alone in his cage with Getrude's robe in his hands; Buddy, in butler's duds, drops a deviled egg from a tray he's struggling to carry; Buddy sits in one velvet chair after another, searching for one that he can settle into comfortably. These are memorable, heartbreaking moments.

Unfortunately, Buddy's tone is all wrong. Thompson tries to balance the fanciful and the sober--and to tell a true story to boot--and the whole rickety thing collapses. By rigidly adhering to the facts of Linz's own memoir, Thompson cuts herself off from plot developments that could've strengthened her tale. What is Linz's relationship with her impossibly understanding husband (played by Robbie Coltrane)? Why does she insist on projecting imagined personalities onto her pets? Thompson also raises the "yeah, right" quotient every time she shows her apes sitting down to dinner at a table like normal humans. Any realism in these scenes is quickly diluted by zaniness.

The larger problem, though, is that Buddy is ostensibly a children's movie. This is a depressing and often scary story, about a serious theme. To gear the film toward kids is a gross miscalculation, one that betrays both the story and its young audience. More than one child at the screening I saw left visibly upset by Buddy's sudden, melancholy rages. And as a adult, I was put off by the film's slapsticky elements. Every few minutes, there are annoying madcap antics by the chimps--as they wear clothes and roller skate and generally undercut the very animal dignity that the film tries so hard to build. It's as though Thompson is ignoring her own lesson--that the line between appreciating animals and exploiting them is tragically thin.--Noel Murray