‘The Day of the Dolphin’ or — John C. Lily was a Complete Idiot?
Mental Health Trigger Warning — Okay look, if you’re a fan of this movie and don’t want to be psychologically distressed or profoundly upset then, under no circumstances, even bother reading this because it’ll just ruin your entire day. Maybe even your week as well.
“Unwittingly, he trained a dolphin to kill the President of the United States” runs the tagline for ‘The Day of the Dolphin’ (1973). “Hmm,” I thought to myself, “That sounds particularly stupid and idiotic.” But let’s not judge too quickly and watch the movie first. After all, it might not be THAT stupid and idiotic.
Turns out ‘The Day of the Dolphin’ isn’t stupid and idiotic in the slightest because the more accurate way to describe it is ‘fucking stupid and idiotic’. Christ, this might be the most inadvertently hilarious, profoundly embarrassing, laugh-out-loud awful, misguided, conceptually brainless, half-witted, half-baked, wholly imbecilic tripe I’ve ever seen. So it’s bloody stupid then, but is it bloody awful? Well…
Look, I’m not going to even bother describing the plot of ‘TDOTD’ to you because it’s ALL there in that tagline — some idiot ACCIDENTALLY trains a dolphin to assassinate the President. We all make mistakes, I guess. What the tagline doesn’t tell you, though, is that this idiot has also taught this dolphin human speech. This is because ‘TDOTD’ is one of those movies based on the work of that bozo acid casualty fruitcake John C. Lily; you know, one of those morons who, much like fellow nut-job Carlos Castaneda, other morons briefly took seriously for a while in the early 70’s until everyone realised they were a couple of assholes.
‘TDOTD’ combines Lily’s dolphin bothering lunacy with the equally unhinged insanity of political conspiracy theories and merges them together into the worst possible of all combinations — New Age Paranoid Aquatic Bollocks meets Mr. Ed. This is fatal to the movie and, even more worryingly, to the viewer’s sanity.
This talking dolphin angle leads the movie into utterly bizarre, but logically predictable, territory. At one point George C. Scott’s dolphinologist (he’s the idiot behind all this nonsense) worries about the ramifications of teaching his dolphins to speak, specifically concerned that they’ll end up being taken away from him by the Government and given recording contracts by record companies. WHAT??!! I had to hold onto the arms of my sofa I was laughing so hard at that! And don’t even get me started when Scott starts fretting that they’ll be killed because they could be called up as witnesses and forced to testify.
The problem is that Scott, along with director Nichols, appears to be playing all this completely straight whereas Buck Henry’s script feels like it’s demanding a massive dose of winking and nudging to let us know how silly this all is. This perceived imbalance between faux seriousness and half-realised humour means ‘TDOTD’ is tonally clashing with itself to such a furious extent it’s like watching one of those wind-up monkeys with some cymbals going berserk for 105 minutes. And even though there’s some nice character work and decent dialogue at play the script also indulges in that worst sort of cod-philosophising and sub-Paddy Chayefsky bullshit (it’s not a surprise Chayefsky would later write ‘Altered States’ which was also based on the work of Lily but at least that had the sense to fully lean into the stupidity and madness) that plagued many a 70’s ‘high-concept’ movie.
The talking dolphins are also a huge problem as they never sound, at any point, like actual dolphins. Sure, they sound like almost every other animal under the sun — chimpanzee, lion, baby, robot baby — but never dolphins so they’re reduced to simply visual and audio incongruities with flippers and blow-holes.
‘TDOTD’ also suffers from a highly irritating structure in that it’s only in the third act that we discover what the movie is building towards (even though if you looked at the poster you’ll already know) and starts to coalesce. The problem is it also dissipates any and all of the interesting ideas it had previously been working with and wastes its climax on nothing more than an unfunny “Oh shit!” gag. So goodbye dramatic tension, then! Yes, it attempts to retrieve some semblance of seriousness with a bleak, yet infuriatingly coy, ending but, by this time, I was laughing too hard to care.
And I did laugh at, and not with, this movie and I mean a lot and hard until I was almost sick on my carpet. And this was full on contemptuous mocking meaning the film could’ve elicited exactly the same reaction from me if it had simply fallen down some stairs whilst carrying some cakes.
Apparently Mike Nichols wasn’t happy with the movie and I can totally understand why because if I had directed this and was sitting at the premiere on opening night then my toes would have curled so violently in embarrassment at what I had put on screen that my shoes would’ve exploded in a shower of leather and laces.
But it’s not all bad, right? No, it pretty much is completely awful but there are some positives. It’s got some nice cinematography and even nicer music and for all the rampant stupidity Nichols has an eye for a strong and striking composition and camera move. Henry’s script works manically to keep the human and emotional elements believable but possibly because everything else — plot, concept, narrative, etc — is utterly beyond salvaging.
Yet all the above means that ‘TDOTD’ is a fascinating watch. It’s certainly not dull and the way it lurches forward dramatically is morbidly captivating but it was just all so idiotic that it made my brain hurt and also made me realise that the older I get the more I find 70’s conspiracy theory movies an insufferable pain in the ass (and yes, I’m including ‘The Parallax View’ in with that lot so deal with it).
Apparently Roman Polanski turned directing the film down because he felt it was narratively and conceptually flawed. That’s a bloody understatement.
