Jane is a celebratory film of a person who is certainly deserving of being celebrated: the acclaimed primatologist and tireless champion of science, environmentalism and women’s rights, Jane Goodall. The documentary is quite conventional in form but remains engaging through dynamic cutting and the sheer force of Goodall’s own personality. While not specifically aimed at children, Jane is clearly a film that is kid-friendly in both tone and content, which helps explain its lack of narrative experimentation. It also excuses the film’s disinterest in using Goodall’s radical biography to make any radical claims or calls to action.
Jane concentrates most of its runtime on Goodall’s early career. In fact, the entire first act details her initial excursion to Gombe, Tanzania, when she was a 25-year-old university staffer without any college education, deployed to the field by famed anthropologist Louis Leakey, who selected her for the task specifically because she lacked formal education. Goodall proved herself more than up for Leakey’s mission—which was observing chimpanzees in the wild in a detailed and unbiased way—through dogged patience and an iron will. She quickly revolutionized basic biological and anthropological thinking and secured substantial financial sponsorship and a team of eager doctoral students to continue her research. In less than a decade, Goodall went from unschooled neophyte to world-famous Dr. Jane Goodall.
The film’s second act is more concerned with social forces in Goodall’s life, particularly her husband, Hugo van Lawick, and son, Grub. She met her husband in the field in Gombe, where he was sent by National Geographic to photograph Goodall’s research. The introduction of these two men into her life eventually brought Goodall to a crossroads: she could continue her cutting-edge research with chimpanzees in Tanzania or she could be a dutiful wife and mother. Being a pioneer to her core, Goodall rejected both choices and forged a middle route: she would spend part of the year on assignment with her husband and part of the year in Gombe, with her son trailing behind her. When Grub was school-aged, she sent him to her mother in England and spent part of the year with him while still spending months in Tanzania conducting research and writing.
It is regarding this part of Goodall’s biography where Jane is lacking. The documentary bounces back and forth between Jane’s personal story and the story of the Gombe chimpanzees, who were undergoing a tragic polio outbreak. Goodall should be the emphasis here; let the third act cover her research and the fate of the chimps. Goodall’s refusal to forswear her professional life for the sake of motherhood and marriage is a crucial part of who she is and a powerful component of her story. She deserves to be a feminist icon, but Jane barely mentions this at all.
That is the real frustration with the film overall. At the very end, Jane allows its namesake a few brief moments to issue a call to action to viewers to work to mitigate the sixth great extinction currently decimating global ecosystems. But Goodall is never offered a real platform, and the film ultimately posits only vague and wishy-washy statements; everyone already wants to prevent mass extinction events when such prevention is framed as a platitude. The film avoids specific demands and all details about what kinds of action one could take to actually help slow down ecological collapse. It is an annoyingly milque toast biography of Jane Goodall, who has demonstrated for six decades her fiery spirit and radical nonconformity.
Ultimately, Jane is still worth the viewer’s time. The cinematography is often beautiful, particularly in the ode-to-van-Lawick montage of various animal migrations across the Serengeti at the very end. There are dozens of stunning, and often adorable, clips of chimpanzees. The film’s interlacing of archival footage of Goodall’s decades-ago excursions to Tanzania with an interview with Goodall today also allows the scientist’s enormous personality and undeniable charisma to take over Jane and push it forward.
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