‘Chimp Crazy’ Gave Me Nightmares

'Mommie Dearest' meets money business.

TW: Animal abuse.

Tonka and Tonia Haddix in Chimp Crazy. Photo: HBO.

How to describe Chimp Crazy succinctly? A Missouri woman adores a chimpanzee so much that she cares for him like a neglected child. She fabricates documents and fakes his death. She conjures up a phony diagnosis to justify actually euthanizing him at the exact moment that it starts to look like PETA and the courts will take him a way. A camera crew, led by Tiger King director Eric Goode, follow every turn of her saga like they’re covert ops. The situation gets too dicey to allow. The filmmakers decide it’s better to turn her in before the woman or the monkey gets hurt. The finale of the four-part documentary series aired Sunday night; Chimp Crazy is poised to be among the most-watched HBO docs ever. 

Tonia Haddix, the chimp-keeper, could be the role of a lifetime for Renée Zellweger or Laura Linney. She cycles through a collection of big, long blonde wigs. She gets her lips filled by a man in a backward cap and her lash technician has given her Miss Piggy lashes.¹ She’s always wearing some shade of pink. But Tonia is as beguiling as she is erratic. At the end of the third episode, perhaps the series’ strongest, Haddix sobs to a judge about how much she misses Tonka, the chimp she swears died of heart failure. She’s dismissed from the Zoom court hearing, shuts her laptop, and runs downstairs to proudly show off where she’s kept him hidden from even the camera crew in cahoots with her. Or so she thinks: Tiger King gave Goode a bad reputation among exotic animal owners, so he sends in Dwayne Cunningham, a former clown who served time for illegally smuggling exotic lizards into the U.S., as a “proxy director”² to coax Tonia in front of the cameras at the series’ start.

At first, the crew seems to view Tonia with a bemused remove. She has the crazy hair and crazy lip filler, sure, and her affection for the chimps might be misplaced but it’s real. In some scenes, Dwayne even seems conflicted about turning into a double agent. Goode appears sparingly, only to play out the most simplistic moral quandaries. He asks a journalist if he should turn Tonia in once he finds that she’s been secretly harboring the animal. “As journalists, we don’t want to do something that’s morally, ethically wrong,” the reporter says. But so much of Chimp Crazy feels kind of exhibitionist and wrong. More than once they lose sight of whether Tonia is their story’s hero — a counterculture warrior triumphant against the brainy, icy PETA staff — or if her maniacal desperation to make Tonka into a martyr makes her the story’s villain.