“Call Jane”: Abortion history that’s being repeated now
When I first saw “Call Jane” in January, I filed it away as an appealing if familiar period piece, more dusty than revelatory. It’s a fictionalized drama about the Jane Collective, a real-life clandestine Chicago group that, starting in the late 1960s, helped women secure safe illegal abortions, stopping only in 1973 with the passage of Roe vs. Wade. Watching it again recently, four months after the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to an abortion, it felt like a different film. History can do that to a movie — and to a critic.
The aesthetic qualities of “Call Jane” haven’t changed since my first viewing, of course. It’s an intimate, fine-looking work that has a lightly grainy visual texture (it was shot on film) and the usual era-appropriate swinging hair, skirts and the like. The director, Phyllis Nagy, making her feature film debut, has embraced unobtrusiveness as a style, perhaps to soft-pedal the material. She doesn’t overuse closeups or indulge in irritating contemporary habits: The camera doesn’t hover pointlessly, there are no self-aggrandizing crane shots. The cast is as appealing as I remembered it; the awkward scenes still jar as do the upbeat music choices.
Written by Hayley Schore and Roshan Sethi, the movie focuses on a fictional character, Joy (a solid Elizabeth Banks), a genial pregnant housewife with a nice husband, a teenage daughter, a pleasant home and not much else going on. Shortly after the movie opens, Joy’s doctor tells her that she has a heart condition that will probably kill her unless her pregnancy is terminated. Because abortion is criminalized in Illinois, she is forced to petition a hospital board to obtain one. At the meeting, her doctor makes the case for her — she brings a tight smile and some home-baked goodies — but the allmale board votes against providing the procedure, deeming that there’s a 50% chance Joy will survive the pregnancy.
Joy is an appealing character, but she’s also about the most anodyne emblem for abortion rights imaginable: a pretty lady with a lifethreatening condition who wants to carry her pregnancy to term but can’t. Nagy tries to push the story beyond its cautious framing, but it’s tough going. She wrote Todd Haynes’ “Carol” — about two women in love in the early 1950s — and here shows a similar interest in exploring the smooth surfaces of repression. The first time that you see Joy, she is floating through a hotel like a soap bubble. Chicly dressed with a complicated upsweep that evokes Alfred Hitchcock’s blondes, she moves as if in a trance all the way through the front doors, where she sees people rioting. It’s 1968, and youth is in revolt.
Joy soon is, too, if slowly. She begins pushing back and breaking free after the medical board’s initial ruling, first by claiming to be suicidal so she can obtain a therapeutic abortion. She keeps
pushing, and when she discovers the Jane Collective, the movie settles into a liberation story about women, emancipation, autonomy and power. Before long, Joy has joined the activist ranks of a vibrant organization made up of gutsy, opinionated, mouthy law-breakers, most notably Virginia and Gwen — the spiky tag team of Sigourney Weaver and Wunmi Mosaku — characters who amp the energy considerably. No more nice girls, well, almost.
“Call Jane” squeezes a lot into its 2 hours, tethering Joy’s coming-intoconsciousness arc to gobs of family drama, a touch of thriller-style intrigue (the Jane activists are always dodging the cops), legal questions, the larger political landscape (enter Richard Nixon) and internecine feminist debates. Both Virginia and Gwen have to explain far too much, with each delivering chunks of exposition that are clearly more for the benefit of the movie’s audience than for any of its characters. Gwen, as the preeminent Black member in the collective, carries an additional burden because she has to deliver a righteous lecture about race and intersectionality, a lesson that the filmmakers should have heeded better themselves.
If the references to race and class feel ritualistic, it’s because the movie largely centers on one woman, a focus profoundly at odds with the political radicalism of the Jane’s collectivism. The real organization used Jane as a code name, as a generic moniker for a group of radicals, many of them veterans of the civil rights movement, who were risking everything, including prison, to help women. Some of that background filters into “Call Jane,” but the movie’s embrace of the traditional heroic narrative is exasperating and does a disservice to the history it relates. To borrow the title of a relevant book, it’s “Our Bodies, Ourselves.”
So, should you see “Call Jane”? You bet. And not just because it’s satisfying to watch Banks, Weaver, Mosaku et al as feminists fighting the patriarchy with wit, intelligence and medical know-how. This is a story that needs to be told, again and again. The Jane Collective has been the subject of several documentaries, including the very engaging recent one, “The Janes,” but in the years between Roe’s passage and overturning, fictional movies have largely avoided abortion and specifically avoided it as a means of female emancipation.
“Call Jane” helps modestly correct that sorry history by showing women organizing, raising consciousness and helping one another at great personal cost. In many ways it’s a process movie. It’s also eerily of the moment. Because, by the time I saw the film a second time, its vision of direct action no longer looked musty but, instead, resembled the new underground abortion networks operating in states that have banned abortion. It looked like now.