This
is a documentary about the life of Jane Fonda, daughter of film star,
Henry Fonda, whom I knew well from his movies of previous eras. I grew
up knowing both of them in their professional roles. This is an
excellent documentary of Jane, who grew up a shy lonely child enduring
her mother's suicide and her father's coldness morphing into a fulfilled
woman becoming an activist for humanitarian causes. It spoke to me.
Later in life she sees herself not defined by the men she was with or to
whom she was married but by her own personal measure and by her own
deeds.
We
see and listen to this documentary told by Jane as she progresses into
the various phases of her life looking at her life through the lens of
not only the three different men she wed and but also in her early years
through the strained almost sterile relationship she experienced with a
father who could act in film but was unemotional and uncommunicative in
life. This documentary is the opposite of that.
It
is a highly emotive documentary reflecting the pain in her early years
because of a father she thought did not love her and the suicide of a
broken mentally ill mother whom she never got to know. Through a
child's immature eyes one could see why she thought herself deficient in
some way even physically unattractive as her father kept chastising her
for being overweight. She was in reality thin and later bulimically
very thin but still incapable of not only receiving love from either
parent but loving herself. Later, finally, on her own in the final
scenes she escapes being defined by the men she wed or her sad
relationship with her father but defines herself in her own right. She
visits her mother's grave for the first time one snowy winter day to
apologize for not trying to understand her mother if only to embrace her
and tell her she understands her mother's own tormented background and
loves her unconditionally.
The
documentary takes us on her life's journey through the men she married,
the films she starred in and the political life she embraced. Her
first marriage to French film director Roger Vadim with whom she had a
child, to political left wing activist Tom Hayden with whom she had one
child and finally to billionaire and media mogul Ted Turner. Jane was a
subsidiary of all of her marriages taking second place to the whims of
what she thought the men in her life wanted her to be.
Vadim emphasized her body cajoling her to act in mindless goddess films such as Barbarella.
Her leftward political turn and her own growth came as mine did during
the Vietnam turbulent years of the Sixties. Though combative I loved
that era. It infused her life and my own life with cerebral meaning.
Her films were many. I am not able to list them all here but her notable
films and ones which impacted my own life and hers were ones filled
with social commentary. They were "They Shoot Horses Don't They," a
dance marathon film about the torturous Great 1929 Depression and the
average people it crushed, "Coming Home," an anti Vietnam war film of
the Sixties, "Julia," a profound look at the evils of fascism and Nazi
Germany, "China Syndrome," a statement on the dangers of nuclear power
and "On Golden Pond," coming full circle acting with her elderly
father, Henry Fonda, reflecting the great depth of their own tortured
relationship, Henry Fonda's explicit iciness to her and Jane's plea for
love from him.
This
is a biographical documentary film for our time as the social split
occurring in the late sixties between the left and the right has gotten
argumentatively worse in this toxic Trumpian era. Trump is a reflection
of our broken nation and is a man who capitalizes on that brokenness. I
loved this documentary because it takes me back to my own metamorphosis
during the late Sixties at a university known for its Berkley-like
leftist political slant at that time. I went from a high school girl
who questioned nothing to a woman decades later who questions everything
as Jane Fonda's later films encourage one to do.
I urge you to see this biography and think about your own human
development and what it means to take a political stand even if the
ridicule one faces is smothering. I was not a radical at that time but I
did love the anti-war radical leftists and black rights advocates
including MLK and Malcolm X who had the fortitude to put their lives on
the line for humane moral causes and a fierce desire to save their
people and humanity from the death that those of privilege and power
often deliver!
Now in her 80's Jane Fonda has found a new zest for life as she plays her last act going through it on her own terms.
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