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Gigi & Nate Tugs Hard at the Heartstrings

Photo: Ann Marie Fox.

“Inspired by” a true story, Gigi & Nate is one of those films that tugs so hard at your heartstrings you might feel some tiny capuchin imprints on them as the credits roll. Charlie Rowe plays Nate Gibson, a teenager celebrating the Fourth of July with a high-peak dive to impress his friends; tragically, his stunt leaves him paralyzed by amoebic meningitis. Now quadriplegic and wheelchair-bound, Nate’s frustrations threaten to overcome him.

Then, enter Gigi. She’s shy, charming, and empathetic, and she wins over Nate, inspiring him to redouble his efforts at recovery.

She’s also, by the way, a monkey.

So Gigi & Nate is not exactly a romance, at least not in the conventional sense. A capuchin monkey rescued from a petting zoo and now retrained as a service animal, Gigi changes Nate’s life, a second time and this time for the better. Not everything goes swimmingly—there is something indeed of the boy-meets-monkey, boy-loses-monkey, boy-gets-monkey cliché afoot here—but it’s Gigi’s expressive eyes, lithe movements, and kind heart that win Nate (and surely many viewers) over.

A young man in a wheel chair with a capuchin monkey.
Charlie Rowe and Allie the Monkey in Gigi & Nate. Photo: Ann Marie Fox.

As a service animal, Gigi helps Nate with his physical therapy as well as his emotional recovery. With her assistance, Nate finds some of the joy he’d missed since his accident, laughing, smiling, learning to play games and enjoy others’ company, until his re-entry to society is complicated by Gigi’s presence. Not everyone is enamored of Gigi, in his home, in town, or on social media, where animal rights activist Chloe Gaines (Welker White) starts a campaign to remove Gigi from the Gibsons’ home, arguing first in the streets and then in the courts that monkeys like Gigi should not be kept, subservient, in humans’ homes. The film presents Gaines and her fellow activists as clearly in the wrong, though whether or not monkeys benefit from this kind of service is a question that’s been asked for years.

With a plot like Gigi & Nate‘s—a melodrama based on a disabled person’s relationship with his capuchin-monkey service-animal—much could go wrong. It would be easy enough for a film like this to lapse into trite sentimentality or hoary cliché. Fortunately, director Nick Hamm resists the temptation to sentimentalize or even much anthropomorphize Gigi (played by a trained monkey named Allie) and to keep the film’s plot moving forward with Nate’s ongoing recovery and its complications. The film is intended, surely, to deliver its message first and foremost, but it never descends too far into the mawkish: its moments of conflict—some internal to Nate’s family dynamic, others external—feel genuine if ever-so-slightly engineered.

Although Gigi & Nate is touted as “inspired by a true story,” and the filmmakers reference “a book” on the topic, there’s no specific case or source noted in the credits or the film’s press materials. (This story seems a little closer than this one!) In 2018, Time Magazine ran a feature on the use of capuchin monkeys as service animals for people with quadriplegia and noted, presciently, “no human-monkey pair can last forever.” The Boston-based Helping Hands organization ceased placing monkeys in human homes in 2020. Aside from the difficulties of training a monkey first for service work and then for film production come other complexities, and the film relies in no small part on the CGI effects of visual artist Scott Anderson (Babe) for scenes where Allie might be endangered. The use of CGI is far less convincing than the simple editing of Allie’s reaction shots and gestures, but it’s necessary.

Then there’s the matter of casting the able-bodied in the role of a disabled person. Gigi & Nate finesses this contemporary dilemma in part by elongating the film’s first, pre-accident act, characterizing teenage Nate as a daredevil free spirit whose life is altered by a freak illness. Charlie Rowe is perfectly convincing and charismatic as the teenager who’s quick to leap off a cliff and then betrayed by his own body. Could a disabled actor have played this part? Certainly, yes, though the film’s portrayal of pre-accident Nate would have to be reduced or altered in some way—which is exactly what the filmmakers did with Allie the monkey.

One can’t quibble with Rowe’s performance. He’s onscreen, with or without Allie, for nearly every minute of Gigi & Nate, and he’s excellent throughout. (It probably does not hurt the film’s appeal that Rowe is typically movie-star handsome with a megawatt smile and persona congenial enough to win over nearly everyone in the film with whom he interacts.) Over the decades, the opportunities for disabled actors to play these kinds of roles have been scarce, from Harold Russell in The Best Years of Our Lives to Marlee Matlin in Children of A Lesser God to Sophie Jaewon Kim in the Netflix Original Series The Healing Powers of Dude. Meanwhile, for scores of abled actors, opportunities to portray disabled characters have been numerous, even historically one path to Oscar glory: between 1988 and 2015 a third of the Best Actor Oscars were awarded for abled actors playing characters with disabilities.

The casting of actors with disabilities in Gigi & Nate is limited to a handful of veterans as unnamed extras. Familiar faces Marcia Gay Harden, Dianne Ladd, and James Belushi alongside relative newcomers Rowe, Josephine Langford, and Hannah Riley comprise the multigenerational Gibson family. To the film’s credit, the struggles to cope with finances, frustrations, and accessibility are all presented as part of the context of the extended Gibson family’s daily life.

A smiling woman touches the face of a young man in a wheelchair with a monkey in his lap.
Charlie Rowe and Marcia Gay Harden with Allie the Monkey in Gigi & Nate. Photo: Ann Marie Fox.

Alongside Rowe—and, of course, Allie—the one family member to make a significant impression is Riley as the dutiful, supportive younger sister. Ladd and Belushi’s roles are small, Harden’s predictable, and Langford’s insufferable, at least until the plot delivers to her a measure of redemption for her noxious narcissism. But the film is really so completely, wholly centered on Rowe as Nate and his monkey that the supporting cast scarcely matters. Viewers may or may not notice that despite the story being set in Tennessee, the cast’s accents seem curiously cosmopolitan for a family that has spent their lives in the South.

As long as you don’t think too, too hard about matters like these or the others the film wants to raise but elides, Gigi & Nate will put a smile on your face with its family-friendly fare. Its leads are simply too charismatic and its story too unusual not to.

Gigi & Nate opens in theaters September 2.

Written by J Paul Johnson

J Paul Johnson is Publisher of Film Obsessive. A professor emeritus of film studies and an avid cinephile, collector, and curator, his interests range from classical Hollywood melodrama and genre films to world and independent cinemas and documentary.

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