Naturalist and narrator extraordinaire David Attenborough is likely beyond the point where he wants to wrestle a baby gorilla in the mountains of Rwanda. But he remembers doing so quite fondly in "A Gorilla Story," a memoir of sorts, as well as a status report on the great apes of East Africa, still endangered, always terrifying.
Why terrifying? Because they're wild, enormously powerful and, like us, unpredictable. It's also because, as Mr. Attenborough puts it, there is something in the eyes of the gorilla that is not just deep but "fills me with a sense of wonder. And fear. But not a fear of them. A fear that I, we, may have missed something. Something important. A deeper understanding of what and who they are. And what that might mean for us."
Much of this "Gorilla Story" is about the "Pablo group," the descendants of the hairy fellow who, as a baby, crawled onto Mr. Attenborough's leg during his first gorilla trip into the Virunga Mountains in 1978. The footage of that visit is both adorable and alarming: Pablo’s mother is right there and our host, then 51 years old (he will be 100 on May 8), rolls around on the ground with Pablo as if the older primate is a favorite uncle. "This would not have been possible without the pioneering work of Dian Fossey," he says, evoking the research of the famed primatologist whose methods Mr. Attenborough took to heart, grunting at the group to signal his intentions and ultimately forming a tight bond with Pablo. As our host informs us with some pride, Pablo went on to found a group of 65 -- the largest ape clan ever, we are told.
The principal focus of "A Gorilla Story" is a small pack led by an older animal named Gicurasi, "well beyond his physical peak" and facing competition from the younger Ubwuzu, who is far stronger and painfully ambitious. When not trying to edge out Gicurasi, Ubwuzu is beating up Imfura, another younger male whose defeat at the hands of Ubwuzu begins his ostracization from the group. But what sounds like the setup to a fairly conventional storyline leads to something not so simple.
Much nature TV take pains to impose a narrative on what has become, across the genre, an increasingly intimate and startlingly beautiful standard of photography; in "A Gorilla Story," one can count the lines on a gorilla's leathery face, even the hairs on his silvery back. But the tale doesn't need any artificial twists. They occur naturally. There's character development. Foreshadowing. The implication that aberrant personality disorders might not be the exclusive purview of humans. And a sense that this moral fable is playing out in other groups among the 600 or so mountain gorillas who are staving off extinction in their Virunga Mountains enclave.
Mr. Attenborough's inaugural visit to Rwanda was in preparation for the original "Life on Earth," the first of a nine-series endeavor but only part of a decades-long career devoted to writing and broadcasting about the natural world. The Rwanda trip, Mr. Attenborough says, wasn't supposed to be about gorillas at all, but rather the opposable thumb, one of the significant characteristics we share with the great apes. But not, as our host makes clear, the only one.