Worth: $15.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Elizabeth Banks, Sigourney Weaver, Chris Messina, Wunmi Mosaka, Kate Mara
Intro:
As a character study of a woman who emerges as a champion of other women, it is effective, but Call Jane needs to widen its focus to embrace the whole movement.
If there is precisely a right time and a wrong time for a film to be released, Phyllis Nagy’s Call Jane would surely qualify. As a movie that explores the past tribulations of women seeking abortion in the United States before Roe vs. Wade was set as law (but with the recent overturning of the precedent), the film appears to be almost naïve about the contemporary political climate in which it was made. Nagy’s well-intentioned piece lacks the anger and urgency that was surely present around the time of production.
Call Jane begins in August 1968 in Chicago, where the streets are boiling with civil resistance. The anti-war activities of the Yippies, who would later become the famous Chicago 7, have reached the privileged side of town where Joy (Elizabeth Banks) and her lawyer husband Will (Chris Messina) are wining and dining at a fancy hotel with the Chicago Bar Society. In a brilliantly executed take, Nagy shows the audience Joy as she transitions from the glamourous event into standing behind riot police. She’s scared, but she’s also curious; the chants of the protestors stay with her.
Joy is a college educated stay at home mother with a teen daughter, Charlotte (Grace Edwards). She’s also in the first trimester of a new pregnancy. Between afternoon drinks with her grieving neighbour Lana (Kate Mara), keeping house, and helping Will with his work, Joy is also trying to connect with Charlotte who seems vaguely uninterested in the world around her. The pregnancy is taking a toll, she’s exhausted and dizzy. After collapsing one day in the kitchen, she is taken to the doctor who tells her that she has congestive heart failure and the only way to ensure her life is safe is to “not be pregnant.”
Joy needs to argue with the hospital board for a “therapeutic termination” – she asks Will to bring his legal expertise to the table, but he is reticent. Unsurprising, as his first question about Joy’s recent hospitalisation was “Is the baby alright?” An all-male board decide that a fifty percent chance of survival for Joy is statistically enough to deny her the procedure. The manner in which they do it is infuriating; they talk over Joy as if her life is irrelevant – and indeed it seems it is.
Forced to seek other means to terminate the pregnancy, Joy eventually comes across The Janes. Nagy doesn’t spare the audience the horror of what women had to face when trying to gain access to illegal terminations. In a back street in Wicker Park, Joy – with $1000 in hand – goes to a seedy establishment where hygiene is of no concern, nor it would appear the women who are seeking help.
She leaves in shock and sees an advertisement to Call Jane for help with pregnancy. She makes the call and is soon taken to a secret location where her abortion is carried out by Dean (Cory Michael Smith). Once again, Nagy refuses to turn the camera away from what Joy experiences; the whole of the procedure is filmed and her acute fear and discomfort (never given credence by the clinical Dean) is rendered for the arduous process that it is – alone, vulnerable, confusing.
Joy’s experience of the day changes as she is ferried to The Janes by Gwen (an absolutely brilliant Wunmi Mosaka). Joy tries to work out who Jane is, but comes to realise that Jane is not one person, but a collective spearheaded by the no nonsense Virginia (Sigourney Weaver). The Janes feed Joy and another woman who just had a termination spaghetti and explain to her what will happen to her body (and mind) post termination. They are warm and familial which comforts Joy.
Virginia checks in with Joy post the procedure and soon asks her to start driving women to the “clinic.” At first, Joy doesn’t want to be involved, but it doesn’t take long until she’s deep into the network and challenging her own assumptions about society and herself.
The story of The Janes is absorbing and an essential part of the history of women’s rights in the States. Nagy and script writers Hayley Schore and Roshan Sethi try to honour their legacy and the determination of the women involved, but somehow lose focus as they concentrate the story on Joy. As marvellous as Elizabeth Banks is in the role, the story of Joy supersedes the story of The Janes. As a character study of a woman who emerges as a champion of other women, it is effective, but Call Jane needs to widen its focus to embrace the whole movement.
The Janes worked in tangent with many organisations, including religious ones who bucked the establishment. They were deeply in need of money (something the film does address) and could not sustain the sheer number of women and girls who needed their services. Heartbreaking messages from women in need are read out in the meetings and The Janes argue about who gets priority. Rape victims? Women of colour? Teenagers? So many women in need, and so many who can’t afford the $600 price tag for the termination.
As Joy is the focus of the film, she works out that Dean is indeed not a doctor and that he can easily teach her how to perform the procedure. This, in turn, leads other women to learn. In the years that The Janes operated, they never lost a patient – an exemplary result considering that more than one woman a week died due to a botched abortion or attempt.
Eventually, the main participants in the network were arrested, but canny lawyering saw them hold out until the legalisation of abortion, for their trial. The film ends on an extremely positive note in 1973, which is perhaps why in late 2022 it will make the audience feel more defeated than elated.
Phyllis Nagy, best known for her script for Todd Haynes’ Carol has made a sufficient film that certainly makes use of Weaver and Banks’ talents as actors; but Call Jane suffers from putting Joy at the centre of everything. While it is interesting to watch the radicalisation of an upper middle-class housewife into an abortion provider, the propensity for the film to dip in and out of melodrama weakens it. Nonetheless, Call Jane is a slice of the bad old times, times that the United States is experiencing again in many places, and a new generation of Janes will emerge and Nagy’s cinematic history lesson, no matter how diluted in places, will be an important document.
