In 1984 circus ringleader David Balding adopted Flora, an orphaned African baby elephant. Cared for as if she were her master's own progeny, Flora lived in privilege as a domesticated pet. As the star attraction of Balding's circus, she took pleasure in performing for families every night, but after sixteen years (long past her infancy and emerging into her fully-formed body), the once vivacious pachyderm naturally turned fickle. Flora began to rebel -- a recalcitrant, endearingly mischievous teenager shedding her juvenility.
Elephants generally live over half a century. Many will outlive their caregivers. So Balding has a ten thousand pound problem -- what to do with his baby girl after retirement?
Filmed over an impressive ten years, director Lisa Leeman's One Lucky Elephant captures a captivating father and daughter narrative: from Flora's final performance and her mercurial violence when separated from Balding to her eventual residence in a self-contained fifty-acre reserve in Tennessee, commonly referred to as The Elephant Sanctuary. It's a charming picture that, not unlike 2003's The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, doesn't merely take singular aim at the titular animal in question.
Under its superficial cutesy pleasantness, the documentary posits a host of questions about the deeply affected humans on display, perhaps victims of their own self-fulfilling prophecy. One Lucky Elephant is not an exercise in the deluded personification of wild animals; rather, it asks whether it's right to domesticate and spoil such creatures, and traces the effects of this activity on both the animals and the humans.
As Flora grows complacent in her newfound home, Balding becomes unnerved, in need of but resistant to professional counsel. The formerly affable, unassuming ringleader clearly begins to suffer from separation anxiety. As Leeman's probing camera suggests, Balding's habitual obsession with Flora combined with his gradual withdrawal from human contact outside his provincial home and community of elephant enthusiasts has apparently brought on symptoms of melancholia. Even Balding's spouse, the "other woman" in his life, plays into the surrogate father's destructive preoccupation.
Though a current of melancholy runs through Leeman's documentary, the briskly paced eighty-four minute feature is ultimately humane in its lack of discernible message and efficient presentation. Wholly satisfying, One Lucky Elephant offers a compelling antidote to the man vs. nature narrative, gently nudging the audience to consider how congruency can be attained in wildlife domestication.
But even more illuminating, One Lucky Elephant reveals how the psyche consequentially rationalizes and copes with the dissolution of domesticated hierarchy. Rarely has the documentary form been so carefully and respectfully modulated in deference to its mammalian subject.
