Despite those glaring omissions you've got to like Fonda, and this film. Full of candid interviews and peppered with interesting archival footage from long ago -- she's 82 -- the film manages to turn a super-glamorous movie star into a real human being, something Fonda never looked like and still doesn't. Sharing the personal details about her childhood and three marriages as if she's talking in private to her best friend after a few glasses of wine, we are suddenly privy to all sorts of dirt.
Who knew that her manic-depressive mother, the wife of screen hero Henry Fonda, regularly fed the family SPAM for dinner and committed suicide when Jane was only 12? Or that Jane and her second husband, political activist Tom Hayden, adopted a young black girl? Or that her third husband, billionaire Ted Turner, is really "a little boy at heart who likes to play" and is desperately afraid to be alone? Or that her only biological daughter, fathered by her first husband Roger Vadim, wants nothing to do with her after she virtually abandoned her as a child in pursuit of a movie career and headline-making anti-Vietnam War activism? Now we know.
While none of this is earth-shattering, still Jane Fonda in Five Acts offers an interesting, behind-the-scenes look at one of Hollywood's most enduring superstars. I suppose that's something.
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