Jane Goodall gets title billing, but it’s the nature photography of Hugo van Lawick that distinguishes this documentary about the life of the famed chimpanzee scientist. Jane is largely built from 100 hours of previously unseen footage that van Lawick took while working alongside Goodall in Tanzania in the 1960s. Director Brett Morgen, along with editor Joe Beshenkovsky, frame that footage with contemporary interviews with Goodall, resulting in a condensed, concise overview of her experiences as a pioneering female naturalist. It’s largely a hagiography (driven by a Philip Glass-powered score), yet a winning one thanks to the number of times the camera captures Goodall’s wonderful smile in response to the animals around her. She’s clearly in heaven. Goodall smiles at the camera too, and indeed she and van Lawick would eventually marry and have a son. If their union didn’t last, at least van Lawick’s time capsule of their work together did. Richly saturated in color, encompassing both insect-level detail and vast, rolling hills, his camera lends a mythical, otherworldly air to the African continent, while also regarding it as a fertile scientific subject. At its best, Jane might just capture what nature looks like through Goodall’s eyes.
