Butler's Cinema Scene

Jane Goodall and friend

“JANE”  My rating: A-

90 minutes | No MPAA rating

It’s not like Jane Goodall’s story hasn’t been told before.

If you recognize her name you probably know that she was the untrained amateur assigned in 1957 by her boss, anthropologist Richard Leakey, to study chimpanzees living in Tanzania’s Gombe Stream National Park. Lacking higher education and all credentials, Goodall, 26, eventually was accepted by the animals and began collecting astounding data and observations; her program is now the longest-running study of animals in the wild.

Over the years there’s been no shortage of coverage of Goodall’s work.  But “Jane” — the new documentary from writer/diredtor Brett Morgan — tells her story from a personal point of view, drawing from 100 hours of never-before-seen footage of this remarkable woman from all stages of her career.

The film — narrated by the 83-year-old Goodall — is visually splendid. But even more striking is the emotional power of Goodall’s tale, of her love of these animals (her scientific detachment has often been called into question), of the amazing moments she has experienced, and of her long study’s revelations, especially the deep connections between simian and human behavior.

It’s also something of a feminist statement. Goodall reveals that in her childhood dreamlife she was always a man: “I wanted to do things men could and women couldn’t.”

She was chosen by Leakey (she was his secretary) to do the chimp study because she had no preconceptions about primate life and behavior. A longtime lover of animals, Goodall saw herself as a distaff Dr. Doolittle: “I wanted to come as close to talking to the animals as I could.”

Enduring rain, heat, poisonous snakes and her subjects’ frustrating fear of humans, Goodall became a sort of jungle girl, a long-legged blonde who bathed in mountain streams and climbed trees to get a better look at the chimps.  Later, she recalls, she was perfectly willing to entertain beauty-and-the-beast comparisons if they would publicize her study and attract funding.

Listening to Goodall speak, one is pinned to the nexus of the scientific and the near mystical. Looking into the eyes of a chimpanzee, she says, “I saw a thinking, reasoning personality looking back.”

Jane Goodall…early in her career

Among her discoveries was the bombshell that chimpanzees fashioned simple tools, stripping leaves from twigs to fish termites out of their holes. Previously only humans were thought to possess that ability. She chronicled chimp parent/child relationships, focusing on the matronly Flo and her offspring.

There were setbacks, like a polio epidemic that threatened to decimate the chimp family (doubly heartbreaking since in its wake Goodall determined that she could never again touch the animals) and a civil war between different factions of the clan that left several of the animals dead.

It took Goodall a while to come to terms with this brutality: “I thought they were like us…but nicer than us.”

Goodall’s professional story unfolds against her personal one — her romance and marriage to National Geographic photographer Hugo van Lawick, the birth of their son, and a divorce prompted by van Hawick’s long absences to film wildlife around the world. We see some of his nature footage, and it is astounding.

Curiously there is no mention here of Goodall’s second marriage, to the director of  Tanzania’s national parks, who died in 1980.

But then “Jane” — produced by the National Geographic Society — sidesteps most  of the controversies that still swirl around Goodall’s methods and findings. The film is a tribute to a remarkable woman, allowing her to look back on her life and work through the lens of time and aging.

On that level alone it is an awesome experience.

| Robert W. Butler