Jane

Plot

Bournemouth, England, in the late 1950s. Jane Goodall is a waitress and secretary with a head full of Tarzan dreams and a savings jar she is filling for Africa. Through a friend she gets a job in Kenya, and there the paleontologist Louis Leakey, looking for someone patient and unprejudiced to study wild chimpanzees, picks her for an expedition to Gombe, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. The colonial authorities will not send a young Englishwoman into the forest alone, so her mother, Vanne, comes along as chaperone for the first stretch of the trip ¹⁵.

The early months go badly. The chimps are terrified of the strange white figure camped among them and vanish at the sight of her. Jane refuses to give up. She keeps her distance, climbs the same ridge every morning, and lets the animals grow used to her silhouette. Slowly, individuals come into focus: the crotchety old matriarch Flo, her infants Fifi and Flint, the confident senior male she names David Greybeard because of the gray hair at his chin.

Then comes the moment the whole film is built around: Jane watches David Greybeard strip the leaves off a twig and use it to unearth ants to eat. He has made a tool. At the time, science held that toolmaking was the defining human trait, that man was Man the Toolmaker, and here is a chimpanzee doing it in front of her ¹⁶. Jane cables Leakey, whose famous reply is that we must now redefine man, redefine tool, or accept chimpanzees as humans. The footage of her crouched in the grass, watching intently as the chimp fishes for termites, is the image that changed textbooks, and Morgen lets it play out at length, letting the audience have the discovery at the same instant she does.

Word of her observations makes National Geographic send a photographer. Hugo van Lawick, a Dutch baron and wildlife cameraman, arrives at Gombe to document her work ¹⁵. His footage, and the film's structure, shift here: we move from Jane's own viewpoint into Hugo's lens, and in doing so we watch the two of them noticing each other. They fall in love on camera, and the film knows it, cutting between her watching the chimps and him watching her. They marry in London in 1964, in a wedding that becomes a National Geographic cover story.

Back at Gombe, the study grows. Jane introduces bananas to draw the chimps into view, and the feeding station becomes a theater of chimp society: dominance displays, alliances, betrayals. The emotional center of the middle stretch is Flo and her son Flint. Jane watches Flo raise Flint with patience, protection, and play, and later explains that becoming a mother herself, to a son nicknamed Grub, taught her more about chimpanzees than years of observation had; she understood their nurturing and their emotional intelligence because she was now living it ¹⁷. Grub, in turn, grows up at the camp as a kind of sibling to the chimp infants, and the footage of a toddler and a baby chimpanzee exploring the same clearing is some of the most disarming in the film.

Then the forest turns. A power shift in the chimp community triggers what Jane calls the four-year war: the large group splinters, and the males of one faction systematically ambush and kill the males of the other, beating them, biting them, and in one remembered case throwing stones into a dying victim's body. The film stages the war as a horror story: the same animals we have watched grooming and playing are suddenly seen charging through undergrowth in coordinated raids, and the film cuts to Jane's face as she processes what she is seeing. She has said that her first idea of chimpanzees was that they were like us but nicer; she had no idea of the brutality they could show ¹⁸. Around the same time, the camp itself is overrun by aggressive chimps, a chaotic, frightening scene in which the animals' behavior slides from comical to dangerous while the editing keeps returning to Jane's reaction ¹⁹.

The darker discoveries keep coming. Grief, too, turns out not to be uniquely human: when old Flo dies, her son Flint, still dependent on her, stops eating and fades away within weeks, and Jane describes the loss with a scientist's precision and a mother's ache. The film closes on the cost of the life she chose. Hugo's work takes him to the Serengeti to film lions and other animals; Jane's work is Gombe, and she will not leave it. They separate and eventually divorce, each unwilling to give up the thing that made them who they are ¹⁷. The film ends with Jane in the present day, still talking about the chimps, her Gombe research now the longest continuous study of wild animals anywhere in the world ¹⁶.

Characters

Jane Goodall (herself) is the film's only true protagonist: a curious, stubborn, romantic young woman who arrives at Gombe with no credentials and outlasts every doubt thrown at her, narrating her own story in a present-day interview with warmth and wry humor. Hugo van Lawick (in archival footage) is the Dutch wildlife photographer whose camera first records her work and whose eye falls in love with her on film; he is the film's second intelligence, and his departure marks its saddest turn. Grub is their son, raised among chimpanzees and living proof of Jane's theories about mothering. Flo and Flint, the chimpanzee mother and son, are characters as fully drawn as any human: Flo's patient rearing of Flint shapes Jane's ideas about raising a child, and their deaths give the film its quietest devastation. Louis Leakey appears in archival material as the patron who gambled on an untrained woman and was proved right.

Interpretations and controversies

There is no disputed ending, but the film did reopen an old debate among primatologists: whether Jane's banana feeding and close habituation of the chimps altered their behavior and contributed to the aggression of the Gombe war years. Critics of her methods have raised this for decades, and the film presents the feeding station and the warfare without dwelling on the charge. Some reviewers also noted that the film is a portrait approved by its living subject, which makes its candor about the divorce and the chimp violence all the more striking.