Abortion as personal rather than political
“Never Rarely Sometimes Always” is an attempt to make a straightforward movie about abortion. This is not easy.
Any story presented about abortion is recognized as a statement in a political argument. To the extent that “Never Rarely Sometimes Always” can be interpreted as a political statement, one could say that it’s certainly in favor of abortions being legal. And as it’s a story of a teenage girl who has to travel from Pennsylvania to New York in order to get the abortion without her parents’ consent, it strongly suggests that abortion laws should be more liberal and that the procedure should be more available.
But it doesn’t actually say anything.
Writerdirector Eliza Hittman has made a controlled and reserved film, and she has placed at its center a reserved and controlled protagonist named Autumn, played with restraint by newcomer Sidney Flanigan.
Autumn has grand passions — we first see her giving a ragged, emotional performance at a schoolwide talent show, and here and there, something wells up within her and breaks out. (In one scene, she throws a drink in a boy’s face.) But most of the time, she keeps her feelings close, as if having decided that no one wants or deserves to know about them.
Her family life is unsatisfying, not miserable, but pitched at a steady lowgrade fever of unhappiness. We see her father in a handful of scenes, and he’s weird and impotently hostile, a vague object of disdain for the entire family. He’s not someone to go to with a problem.
Some things are easy to infer. Others are hard to understand, even upon reflection. For ex
ample, Autumn goes to the local women’s health center, where they tell her that she is 10 weeks pregnant. Then we find out that the place is actually an antiabortion pregnancy center, where she is strongly encouraged to have the baby. Yet a few days later, a reputable New York clinic tells Autumn that she is, in fact, 4½ months pregnant.
So what’s the source of the discrepancy: the ineptitude of the original clinic? Or were the workers there lying? But if they were lying, why would they tell her 10 weeks instead of 19? Was it to get her to stall beyond some point of no return? I would think that if they were lying, they’d be more likely to do the opposite and say she was more pregnant than less.
It’s also a rather curious thing that Hittman chose to make Autumn quite that pregnant. The movie doesn’t indicate anything about why Autumn waited so long. It makes no judgment about that. It just drops that information. But it’s some serious information. A 19weekold fetus isn’t viable, but that’s pretty far along. Is Hittman challenging us, to see how far we will go in supporting Autumn’s choices? Or is she saying something about Autumn that she wants us to know?
I suspect neither, and in a way this is a virtue of the movie. It’s a kind of Rorschach test.
The film’s title comes from a scene in which a social worker at the New York center asks Autumn a series of questions, to which she must answer never, rarely, sometimes, or always. The questions are about her sexual history, and in a long, unbroken shot we watch as Flanigan’s emotions come closer and closer to the surface. We never find out what exactly is the source of Autumn’s pain, but we believe it.