In the 1999 movie Instinct, Anthony Hopkins plays a renowned anthropologist, Dr. Ethan Powell, who “goes ape,” vanishing for more than a year to live alone with a band of mountain gorillas. This may not qualify him as a hermit in the truest sense, but that’s the advantage of a personal blog – if I think he’s a hermit, then here, he’s a hermit. For most of the movie he’s a “captured” hermit.
I like just about everything Anthony Hopkins does. When I think of this movie, I see Hopkins coursing the jungle with that long white hair. Actually, the primary setting of the movie is the psychiatric section of a maximum security prison where Dr. Powell is incarcerated after killing some gorilla-murderers.
The movie is a psychological thriller a la One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Dr. Theo Caulder (Cuba Gooding, Jr.) is tasked with reaching out to the initially-silent Dr. Powell (Hopkins). The movie is loosely based on the 1992 environmental sustainability novel Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. The movie’s sustainability message ebbs more than it flows and Instinct was never a blockbuster; but it’s a good, winter evening’s home entertainment. Great acting is the primary sustainability element of the film.
