A 1960s secret abortion network in ‘Call Jane’

In Phyllis Nagy’s “Call Jane,” Joy (Elizabeth Banks) is a 1960s housewife married to a defense attorney (Chris Messina) with a teenage daughter (Grace Edwards) and a baby on the way. A heart condition, though, threatens her life in childbirth. The only treatment, her doctor tells her, is “to not be pregnant.”

When they, acting on the doctor’s advice, appeal to the hospital’s board for permission to conduct a therapeutic termination, this critical moment in Joy’s life passes curtly. The all-male board members discuss it briefly while not acknowledging Joy, across the table. “No regard for her mother?” she asks. Their votes sound the answer. “No.” “No.” “No.”

“Call Jane,” which opened in theaters Friday, is set more than 50 years ago but it could hardly be more up-to-the-minute. Following the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade earlier this year, abortion - which Pennsylvania Senate Republican candidate Dr. Mehmet Oz recently described as between “a woman, her doctor and local political leaders” - is again a hotly debated issue in upcoming elections.

Nagy, the screenwriter of Todd Haynes’ radiant ‘50sset 2015 drama “Carol,” again illustrates how the past can illuminate the present. “Call Jane,” made before the end of Roe v. Wade but when its future was increasingly precarious, dramatizes the Jane Collective, a Chicago network of women activists who in the years before legalized abortion, clandestinely helped other women obtain safe abortions.

“Call Jane” is just one of the films about abortion rights that by happenstance have debuted this year. Audrey Diwan’s piercing “Happening,” about a young woman in 1963 France, remains one of 2022’s standouts. Tia Lessin and Emma Pildes’ HBO documentary “The Janes” grippingly recalled the Jane Collective, with colorful reflections from the women who helped run it.

“Call Jane,” the glossiest of the bunch, lacks the vivid detail of “The Janes” or the riveting visual intimacy of Diwan’s movie. But all three films bear an of-the-moment urgency and a deep sense of empathy for the adversities faced by women whose choice has been taken from them. “Call Jane” distinguishes itself as a stirring portrait of the birth of an unlikely abortionrights activist.

Banks, always good but especially strong here, plays a woman who looks more ‘50s than ’60s. But she is slowly awakening to the changing times. In the opening scene, she walks through an elegant hotel lobby with sumptuous music playing - a moment that would fit right in in “Carol” - only to be struck at the raucous sound of women protesting outside. “You can feel a shifting current,” she tells her husband.

Their family life is traditional, loving and - aside from a Velvet Underground record - conservative. Centering the story on a straight-and-narrow character like Joy is, itself, a reminder of the wide spectrum of people who might one day reluctantly seek an abortion. Joy’s options, initially, are terrible. “There’s always insanity,” the doctor tells her. One woman suggests: “Just fall down a staircase.”

Awakening

It’s a paper ad at a bus stop that brings Joy to Jane. After a hesitant phone call, she’s brought to their offices by blindfold. But “Call Jane” doesn’t play up the covert aspect of the group’s activities. Nagy instead stays focused on Joy’s awakening to a wider world of female fellowship that’s more frank about sex and its repercussions. Virginia (Sigourney Weaver) is the group’s leader and a natural hippie foil to Joy. She calls Joy “Jackie O.” Soon after Joy’s own procedure, Virginia lures Joy into volunteering with the collective. At first, Joy isn’t entirely convinced. One young woman who comes to Jane is having unprotected sex with a married man, Joy is appalled to learn. But Virginia lays down the law: “We help women. We don’t ask any questions.”

“Call Jane” loosens up notably inside the collective, a varied group of women that includes a Black Power activist (Wunmi Mosaku) and a nun who fields phone calls (Aida Turturro). There may have been more possibilities here for the film, which spends a lot of time with the group’s less valorous doctor (Cory Michael Smith), who performs the procedures. But that, too, becomes part of Joy’s storyline, as she gets more and more deeply involved with Jane. For Joy, it’s more than a cause. For the first time, she realizing her own power.

There are probably many more stories that could be told about the Jane collective, which facilitated an estimated 12,000 abortions in the years before Roe v. Wade. But few know how to tease out threads of repression in a society like Nagy. The conventional approach of “Call Jane” is a statement, itself. This could be anyone’s story.

“Call Jane,” a Roadside Attractions release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for some language and brief drug use. Running time: 121 minutes. Three stars out of four.

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LOS ANGELES: Documentaries about feminist leader and politician Bella Abzug and a deadly 1985 Philadelphia police bombing are the winners of this year’s Library of Congress film prize.

“Bella!” and “Philly on Fire” were selected by Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden and veteran documentarian Ken Burns, the latter among those for whom the prize is named. It’s the first time that two films were chosen for the award, which is in its fourth year.

“They were both spectacular,” Burns said in an interview. He and Hayden, who were tasked with making the final decision after submissions were winnowed down by “a couple layers” of judges, realized that they were faced with an impossible decision.

“We couldn’t chose one and not the other,” Burns said. Each of the winners announced Tuesday for the Library of Congress Lavine-Ken Burns Prize for Film will receive the full $200,000 grant intended for use in final production and eventual distribution.

“Philly on Fire,” directed by Ross Hockrow and

Tommy Walker (“Kaepernick & America”), examines the Philadelphia police attack on the rowhouse headquarters of a Black liberation group, Move. Eleven people died, including five children, and some 60 neighborhood homes were destroyed.

It’s an “urgent and important and timeless film, and so meticulously made and so balanced,” Burns said. “An event like this could be easily treated superficially and used as a kind of political or polemical cudgel to beat the audience. And it doesn’t do that. It does makes the audience a kind of equal partner in the discovery of it.”

The Library of Congress prize was established to support documentaries using original research and archival material to “bring American history to life.”

Grants of $25,000 will go to four finalists: “Cannabis Buyers Club,” directed by Kip Andersen and

Chris O’Connell; “Imagining the Indian: The Fight Against Native American Mascoting,” directed by Aviva Kempner and Ben West; “Raymond Lewis: L.A. Legend,” directed by Ryan Polomski with co-director

Dean Prator; “Virgil Thomson: Creating the American Sound,” directed by John Paulson. (AP)