Tropic Sprockets / Jane

By Ian Brockway

The British primatologist Jane Goodall comes to life in this impactful and vivid documentary directed by Brett Morgen (Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck). From start to finish, “Jane” is imagistic and striking, helped in no small part by the music of Phillip Glass which turns this documentary into a riveting suspense film akin to “Mosquito Coast” and “The Lost City of Z.”

Goodall started out as paleo-anthropologist Richard Leakey’s secretary, hired to study chimps in the African wild with no formal training or experience. In 1951, there were no solid firsthand accounts of chimp behavior, but Goodall had the open mind that Leakey was looking for in seeking the keys to early humankind.

We first see Jane as a kind of Alice in Wonderland living in a simian dream. As she says in her journal: “I have been wanting to do this my whole life. Is this possible? Is this really me?” Goodall says further in voiceover, “This was my dream and now I was living in it.” As an existentialist, Goodall created her own personal dream. She is both a visionary traveler and a primate explorer, deep in her own self-created jungle.

After shots of flora and fauna, huge leaves in deep focus cover the screen. A landscape emerges, a vast territory as intense and crystal clear as a mural by Salvador Dali or Henri Rousseau. The lens stays fixed on the other wordly blonde and clear-skinned Goodall and one realizes with surprise and alarm that the behaviorist herself is a creature, or as Goodall self reflects a “white ape.” The scientist yearns to be intimate with the chimps and to communicate with them in their own language, but connections elude her. Months and even years go by with no contact. She is a woman alone.

Just as she is about to make a possible breakthough, National Geographic hires photographer Hugo van Lawick to document her research. Though discouraged by the intrusion in her “small paradise,” Goodall agrees. A long partnership follows including marriage and a son, Grub.

This is a stirring documentary. Goodall emerges as an uncompromising person, obsessive and artistic within her perspective in service to the animal kingdom. Though focused, the famed researcher’s sight is by no means insular or short. Goodall finds traces of common ground that animates all of the primates: rage, jealousy, maternal care and love.

Fame means little to Goodall. A simian connection combined with understanding is her cause. Through cuts in funding and a divorce, she lopes on, a white ape in human form to break the biblical decree of man’s dominion over all animals and to perhaps understand something of a chimp’s special sentience, respect and mystery.

This is a one of a kind film with the emotion and power of a psychological character study. Goodall, an explorer of the primate mind is as wild and exotic as the beings she documents. As a self made person, “Jane” exposes a primatologist’s human passions for knowledge above all, as well as the dangers that this pursuit contains. It is not for every heart. But for Jane Goodall who appears dispassionate yet strangely giddy, her quest is never halting.

Write Ian at [email protected]

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