The story being told in Call Jane is undeniably an important and, through something of an accident of timing, particularly vital one. Screenwriters Hayley Schore and Roshan Sethi transport the audience back to 1968 – before the United States Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision secured the federal right for women to choose to end their pregnancies if necessary or desired and, obviously, before the recent Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision reversed that ruling and sent such rights back to state legislatures. If the latter had not happened, this would simply be a movie about the kind of widespread situation that led to the fight for the right to choose. Now that those rights have been significantly limited, it is a reminder that we need to fight again.
Sadly, Phyllis Nagy’s directorial debut is also a reminder of the late, great Roger Ebert’s old adage – that a movie is not about what it is about, but how it is about that thing. In this case, we have a stodgy and old-fashioned historical drama that simplifies the heroism of an entire movement to the actions of a single person in their name, which also happens to be coming out soon after a Supreme Court decision that highlights the need for a grassroots organization like the one in this movie. Somehow, the film feels both vital, in that it rouses the anger and reflects the frustration of a generation, and strangely slight, because all it promises and provides are the broadest strokes of that anger and that frustration.
The person in question is Joy (Elizabeth Banks) – a fictional conglomeration of many suburban housewives who must have found themselves in this particular situation – whose current pregnancy, her second with husband Will (Chris Messina), is not going well. After a fainting spell, a doctor informs her of her congenital heart failure in the first trimester and that her only option is “not to be pregnant anymore.” That means an abortion, which is largely an illegal measure in the late 1960s, except in cases that endanger the mother’s life. Even then, however, the decision falls upon a vote by the all-male, mustache-twirling board of executives at the hospital, who decide that the slim chance of the infant’s survival is enough to reject the measure (in case one was wondering if the movie was at all subtle, there’s the answer).
Desperate for a solution, Joy visits a back-alley abortion provider and, eventually, finds Jane, a service (under the guise of a single person’s name, the better to advertise on street corners) led by Virginia (Sigourney Weaver) and populated by women who have either had the procedure done themselves or, at the very least, sympathize with and want to help those who are seeking it. Instead of telling those stories, the film opts to follow Joy through her own journey – first, receiving the procedure (Cory Michael Smith plays the terse and rather dismissive doctor) and, then, welcoming in new patients as a volunteer behind closed doors and away from her husband and their teenaged daughter (Grace Edwards). Eventually, she begins to perform the procedures herself.
There is value to all this, of course, but Nagy is determined to tell much of this story mostly without the “mess” of straightforward political commentary (a discussion of the inequity of the procedure and its high cost for communities of color is had, but never genuinely felt elsewhere). Some moments of individual power – Joy’s abortion and a discussion between mother and daughter – clash with the simplistic structure, while Kate Mara plays Joy’s friendly neighbor, whose only reason for being here is to court a potential affair with Will that goes nowhere and contributes nothing. Call Jane is too distracted by being as safe as possible to do more than communicate a few obvious truths with the subtlety of a mallet.
Photo courtesy of Roadside Attractions
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