114 min | PG-13 | September 2, 2022 | Roadside Attractions
A meningitis infection leaves a vibrant young man paralyzed from the neck down. His family brings home a capuchin monkey to give him back his independence and his will to fight. The monkey is the most honest performer on screen.
Nate Gibson is an active young man in the American South whose life stops in an instant. He contracts meningitis and survives as a quadriplegic. His family acquires a capuchin monkey named Gigi to serve as his hands and his reason to keep going. Nick Hamm builds the film around the bond between the paralyzed man and the animal. The real subject is a family that refuses to let a diagnosis define the rest of a life.
Charlie Rowe plays Nate with his body locked and his face doing the heavy lifting. He registers despair and small recoveries through the eyes alone. Marcia Gay Harden plays Claire, the mother, as a woman who turns grief into logistics. She is the engine of the household, and Harden gives her a brittle, organizing determination. Jim Belushi plays Dan, the father, with a quieter helplessness that the script underuses. Diane Ladd plays Mama Blanche, the grandmother, and delivers the bluntest lines in the house.
Nick Hamm directs from a screenplay by David Hudgins. The script moves through its inspirational beats on a schedule, and every setback arrives only to be overcome by the next scene. The score swells under the recovery montages and tells the audience exactly when to feel. The capuchin performs real tasks on camera, and those moments carry more conviction than the dialogue around them. Hudgins then builds a third-act legal fight over the monkey that flattens the human drama into a courtroom argument. The film keeps reaching for the obvious lever when a subtler one sits right beside it.
The story is true and the emotion is real, but the film reaches for both with the same blunt instrument. It treats the viewer as a target rather than a partner. Rowe and Harden do honest work inside a structure that never trusts them to earn a feeling without underlining it. The connection between Nate and Gigi is the one element the film does not have to manufacture. Everything around it is engineered to move you, and the engineering shows.