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Documentarian Brett Morgan (“The Kid Stays In The Picture”) utilizes roughly 100 hours of previously-believed lost footage (taken by Jane Goodall’s husband Hugo van Lawick) of Goodall’s exploits in Africa’s Gombe region to craft a documentary that stalls as much as it reveals. 
The result is a limited but significant window into Jane Goodall’s bold mission to study and organize the behaviors and habits of chimpanzees in the wild without having any formal education to inform her research or approach to the mysterious subject at hand.
The film tells of Goodall’s early exploits in 1960 Africa after being hand-picked by Kenyan archaeologist Dr. Louis Leakey to study chimpanzees based on a six-month grant.
With her weak chin, blonde hair, and eternal curiosity, Goodall fearlessly sets about creating systems for cataloguing the behaviors and experiences of a group of chimpanzees to whom she becomes a de facto family member.
Romance attends her remote jungle when National Geographic photographer Hugo van Lawick falls head-over-heels in love with his subject. Still, the film skips over too many details of the couple’s experiences raising their son Grub in the heart of the Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania, Africa.
Goodall narrates much of the film. Her calm demeanor belies the danger and discomfort she surely endured on a minute-to-minute basis in the jungle. Missing are answers to many burning questions about such things as Goodall’s mother (who attending the initial expedition with her daughter). Morgan also passes up the opportunity to elucidate Goodall’s methods of collecting data, and the specific information she was collecting.
Philip Glass’s musical score provides a comfortable soundscape for a documentary that plays it too safe, considering the dangerous nature of its environment. “Jane” is nonetheless an informative documentary about a truly revolutionary woman whose work as a primatologist, ethologist, anthropologist, and UN Messenger of Peace, continues to this day.
Rated PG. 90 mins.
