Depressingly timely given recent rollbacks on reproductive rights in parts of the US, Poland and elsewhere, abortion dramas seem to be enjoying something of a mini-boom recently. Following Never Rarely Sometimes Always (2020). Plan B (2021), Venice festival prize-winner Happening (2021) and more comes Call Jane, a partially fictionalised retro-drama rooted in real events in late 1960s Chicago, where a clandestine activist group calling themselves the Jane Collective began offering illegal terminations to desperate pregnant women.
Wih Elizabeth Banks and Sigourney Weaver toplining a mostly female ensemble cast, Call Jane marks the feature directing debut of London-based New Yorker Phyllis Nagy, a playwright and screenwriter best known for scripting Todd Haynes’ Carol (2015). A feminist history lesson with a by-the-numbers plot and fairly glib female empowerment message, Call Jane is easy to like but hard to love. Premiered online in Sundance last month, Nagy’s film also screens in competition at the Berlinale this week. Distribution deals have already been signed for multiple territories.
Banks stars as Joy, a stereotypically submissive, blonde, conservative 1960s sitcom housewife living in Chicago’s smart picket-fence suburbs with her sympathetic but chauvinistic lawyer husband Will (Chris Messina). A closet rebel at heart, Joy becomes secretly fascinated by the hippie counterculture after witnessing the riotous events around the Chicago Democratic Convention in August 1968, but her real revolutionary awakening comes when the personal becomes political. Diagnosed with a rare heart problem midway through pregnancy, she is advised that only an abortion can guarantee her survival. Terminations were illegal at the time, requiring a special medical exception, which Joy’s all-male hospital board refuse to grant her.
Seeking help on Chicago’s lawless underground fringes, Joy eventually stumbles across the Janes, a secret alliance of feminist activists providing pregnant women with clandestine abortions for a steep fee. The group rely on the services of sleazy, grasping, brusque doctor Dean (Cory Michael Smith), hence the high price. Following her her own termination procedure, which Nagy depicts in comic-horror detail, Joy meets group leader Virginia (Weaver), a radical den mother clearly modelled on the real Janes founder Heather Booth.
After faking a miscarriage at home to explain losing her baby, Joy hopes to draw a line under the whole traumatic episode. But wily, charismatic Virginia has already spotted Joy’s latent potential as an ally and asset, slowly coaxing her our of cosy suburbia and into the sisterhood. Reluctantly at first, this fairly straight homemaker soon begins to embrace her inner radical, smoking marijuana, cooking food to Velvet Underground albums and schooling herself in medicine. Crucially, she also helps find ways for the Janes to make their services more affordable to poorer women, particularly from African-American backgrounds.
Nagy does a pretty commendable job with her directing debut, aided by a largely female team on both sides of the camera. Cinematographer Greta Zozula’s mastery of long, gliding tracking shots is notable from the opening scene. Banks has fun teasing out the subversive mischief lurking behind the Mad Men cocktail dresses and pastel pantsuits, and Weaver is reliably great as ever, radiating intellect and empathy. But the weak link in Call Jane is the screenplay by Hayley Schore and Roshan Sethi, which is full of blandly righteous heroines, toothless comedy villains and heavy-handed dialogue. There is scant trace here of the nuance and texture seen in other recent dramas about this period, such as the FX miniseries Mrs. America (2020) or the Netflix feature The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020).
Ending on a triumphant coda with the historic Roe Vs. Wade Supreme Court victory of 1973, Call Jane also feels oddly slight and undramatic for such a world-shaking, contentious topic. Police raids, mobster landlords, prison terms and clashes with black activist groups are mentioned in passing, but strangely they all happen off-screen. The most serious challenge we witness the Janes group face are minor disagreements between members, which typically end in conciliatory hugs and bowls of spaghetti. The fierce ongoing culture wars over abortion rights were never as sweet and orderly as they appear in this well-meaning, gently charming, sporadically funny but ultimately lightweight film.
Director: Phyllis Nagy
Cast: Elizabeth Banks, Sigourney Weaver, Chris Messina, Kate Mara, Wunmi Mosaku, Cory Michael Smith, Grace Edwards, John Magaro
Screenwriters: Hayley Schore, Roshan Sethi
Producers: Robbie Brenner, David Wulf, Kevin McKeon, Lee Broda, Claude Amadeo, Michael D’Alto
Cinematography: Greta Zozula
Editor: Peter McNulty
Production designer: Jona Tochet
Costume designer: Julie Weiss
Music: Isabella Summers
Production companies: Robbie Brenner Productions (US), Redline Entertainment (US), Herring Cove Productions (US)
World sales: Protagonist Pictures, London
Venue: Berlin International Film Festival (Competition)
In English
121 minutes
