Fogged In GORILLAS IN THE MIST

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Some lives are movies waiting to be made. They have a clear narrative line that can be shaped into a dramatically coherent, even suspenseful, form. Other lives are picture books waiting to be browsed. They produce unforgettable images, but they resist the storyteller's connective art.

Dian Fossey was a figure of the latter sort. She went to Rwanda in east- central Africa as a child of the '60s, hoping to find a bit of adventure by observing an endangered subspecies, the mountain gorilla. In 1985 she was murdered, under mysterious circumstances, at the research station she had built up for nearly 20 lonely years. In that time, an agreeable young woman became a hard, half-mad case who nonetheless saved "her" gorillas from almost certain extinction.

It is the virtue of Anna Hamilton Phelan's script, Michael Apted's direction and Sigourney Weaver's strong, stark performance that they resist sentimentalizing Fossey. The filmmakers seem content with the notion that saintliness is a form of lunacy. For their lack of conventional biopic piety, they deserve respectful gratitude.

$ But most of the movie's tensions are inside Fossey, and therefore invisible. Her friendships in the animal kingdom provide images that are at first entrancing, then repetitive. Her affair with a photographer (Bryan Brown) is never a believable enticement toward a return to civilization. And since Gorillas in the Mist does not reveal whether Fossey's murder was the consequence of the life she chose or just an absurd mischance, the story ends inconclusively, in a moral and dramatic fog. R.S.