Midway through the remarkable new documentary Jane comes a scene that could stand for its whole improbable story. Twenty-something Jane Goodall, not yet a credentialed scientist but doing the work of several, sits with a telescope on the floor of an African forest watching chimpanzees in a tree, while beside her at arm’s length sits another chimpanzee, in turn watching her with an intentness as rapt as her own. We are put here on earth to behold, claimed Thomas Aquinas—moreover, to behold in love. Goodall is doing just that; who can say the chimp is not doing the same?
“What an amazing privilege it was,” Goodall reflects, “to be utterly accepted thus by a wild, free animal.” That privilege, if privilege is the word, was hard-won.
As a child in wartime London, she read Tarzan books and dreamed of living in Africa with animals. When her family couldn’t afford university, she worked as a waitress, saving tips until she could pay her way to Nairobi. There, in 1957, with more than a touch of boldness, she telephoned the paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey, who hired her as a secretary and later arranged for her to take on a study of chimpanzees in what now is the Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania. Almost nothing was then known of chimpanzees, and Leakey hoped that behavioral studies might illumine his own work on human progenitors—and that Goodall’s very lack of formal scientific training, along with her intellect and determination, would yield observations untainted by academic orthodoxy.
Jane Goodall and Flint, the first infant chimp born at Gombe after Jane arrived, reach out to touch each other’s hands. (Credit: National Geographic Creative/Hugo van Lawick)
She would need to accustom chimps to her presence—to become to them, as she puts it, a “big white ape”—but for months they merely ran away from her. She discovered nothing meaningful, and her funding was running out. At last came the day when she spied a chimp stripping the leaves from a twig, then poking it into a termite mound and pulling it back out covered with termites for a meal. Here was a chimpanzee making and using a rudimentary tool—something it was thought only human beings could do. Leakey was beside himself, writing her that they would need to redefine “tool,” redefine “man,” or accept chimps as human. In the event, he got funds from the National Geographic Society for Goodall to continue at Gombe.
In Jane, now in limited theatrical release, we see Goodall slowly win over the chimp community, becoming not quite one of them but close enough. Hand meets hand, in the manner of the Michelangelo on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. She tickles a young chimpanzee and waves to another with the arm of a stuffed toy chimp.
Jane Goodall and David Greybeard, the first chimp to lose his fear of Jane. (Credit: National Geographic Creative/Hugo van Lawick)
At the time, she tells us, “It was held at least by many scientists that only humans had minds, that only humans were capable of rational thought. Fortunately, I had not been to university, and I did not know these things. I felt very much that I was learning about fellow beings capable of joy and sorrow, fear and jealousy.”
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Jane Goodall’s story might seem an unlikely subject for Brett Morgen, a director best known for documentaries on the life of grunge rocker Kurt Cobain and the early decades of the randily impudent Rolling Stones. But Morgen, whose forte is the creation of films from existing matter, was sought out by National Geographic, which had on its hands a trove of some 100 hours of archival 16mm footage of Goodall and her work shot by the wildlife photographer Hugo van Lawick.
Jane Goodall and photographer Hugo van Lawick. (Credit: Jane Goodall Institute)
Even without audio, the images could all but tell the story: Jane, barefoot, climbing gaunt old African trees to scan the green hills round about. A young female chimp twirling her infant brother on a stick. Another chimp stealing armloads of bananas from Jane’s tent, one more banana stuck in its mouth like a crook’s cigar. By today’s lights the 16mm film is a bit low-res, but a few minutes in, it feels perfect, a through-the-looking-glass texture. Not that you’d want to subtract the sound: The minimalist composer Philip Glass has written an orchestral score deftly mitered to the film’s emotions. The voiceover, spoken by Goodall herself, combines interviews with bits from her books—a good thing, since words on Goodall written by others tend to veer from the documentary toward the devotional.
At Jane’s arrival, Gombe seems an Eden. Scrabbling in shorts up steep hillsides, never getting a visible scratch, Jane amounts to a mythical figure. Poisonous snakes in her path fill out the Edenic milieu—or nearly so, since in this edition of paradise, woman is first to arrive on the scene, and it is she who names the animals, at least the chimpanzees: Goliath (the dominant male), Mr. McGregor (presumably for Beatrix Potter’s irascible gardener), David Greybeard (an old guy), Flo (a favorite), and Fifi (Flo’s daughter), among many others.
From staid scientists Goodall takes flak for giving names instead of numbers and for seeing personalities in her anthropoid subjects, but she goes on undaunted. At first she resists the mythmaking and public appearances, but soon sees the need of it all for fund-raising and for calling attention to the plight of chimpanzees in a modernizing and more crowded Africa. Newspapers bill her as a “Pert Scientist” and “Comely Miss.” She brushes it off: “People said my fame was due to my legs. It was so stupid—it didn’t bother me. . . . I was needing to raise money myself, so I made use of it.”
At its wild African heart, Jane is a love story. And Jane, in love with her chimps and her work, is as appealing a lover, a real one, as ever appeared on a screen. (Herewith the devotional.) The ponytail, the smile a bit rabbit-toothed, the green eyes reflecting the punched-up forest greens of an otherwise realistic film palette.
A classic, yet unconventional, love triangle develops. A photographer, van Lawick, arrives to document her studies; this too she is unhappy about, but ungrudgingly goes along with it. They fall in love. We feel a twinge of guilt, looking on when the camera rolling on a tripod catches the two of them working with chimps and trading smiles. There are moments of intimate serenity with the human pair and the chimps around them. Jane and Hugo marry and honeymoon in the Alps. A son arrives, Jane seeming as surprised as if she’d never heard what causes such events. Hugo’s assignment at Gombe comes to an end, and he goes off to film in the Serengeti. Jane and their son go along, but it doesn’t work. Her first love is back at Gombe—is Gombe—her own work with chimpanzees. She’s forced to choose.
Jane Goodall kisses her son, Hugo “Grub” van Lawick Jr. (Credit: Jane Goodall Institute/Hugo van Lawick)
Those chimps, meanwhile, have made not love but war. Brutal battle has broken out, and all in a splinter group have been killed. Jane, who has always seen war as “a purely human behavior,” now comes to accept that “the dark and evil side of human nature is deeply embedded in our own genes inherited from ancient primate ancestors.”
Somber, but not the end of the story. The closing note was struck earlier, really, in a scene when Jane, alone with the chimps at Gombe, walks in the rain with binoculars, watching. On her head and shoulders she wears a sheet of whitish plastic, flowing and translucent, looking for all the world like a veil.
Parker Bauer is a writer in Florida.
