Call Jane
A powerful look at the pre-Roe era that doesn't preach or condescend, but simply depicts how women from different walks of life organized to provide abortions.
Joy, played by Elizabeth Banks, lives in a world of blissful privilege. She’s a young-ish mom married to a rising criminal defense lawyer and has a lovely 15-year-old daughter. They live in a nice Chicago neighborhood circa 1968, where the social upheaval of the era exists totally outside her ken — something only glimpsed when she witnesses a protest during a rare jaunt downtown for high-end hobnobbing.
When she becomes unexpectedly pregnant and her life is threatened by cardiomyopathy, Joy and her husband, Will (Chris Messina), appeal to the hospital board for an exception to perform an abortion. It’s a telling scene, in which a group of old doctors, several of them smoking, vote it down unsympathetically, noting she has a 50-50 chance of surviving.
The story of what happens next forms the basis of “Call Jane,” a powerful new feature film about the pre-Roe era. It centers on The Janes, aka the Jane Collective, a real group of women from different walks of life who came together to provide the medical care they could not legally receive at the time.
Joy obtains her abortion, and then is cajoled by the ringleader, Virginia (Sigourney Weaver), into becoming a volunteer to help other women like her. Soon she’s caught up in a bonafide movement, living a secret life aside from her comfortable suburban one.
Like Joy herself, “Call Jane” is stubbornly apolitical. I think that’s what gives it its heft and timeliness. Works of based-on-true fiction like this tend to be very preachy and/or condescending. They treat their characters as unblemished heroes and everyone who opposes them as backward troglodytes.
Instead, this movie simply presents the unordered experience of women like Joy and Virginia, who are fictional characters representative of the real Janes. They are decidedly flawed, afraid, spar with each other and tend to wear blinders about the tangible effects of the abortions they’re providing.
For example, Joy’s first “client” is a young woman who has been impregnated by her boss. She is repulsed by the girl’s nonchalant approach to getting an abortion, in contrast to the emotional and spiritual turmoil Joy went through.
But Virginia counsels that they’re there to help whoever needs it. Many of the others getting abortions through the collective have been raped, endure mental illness, health crises or are simply too overburdened by existing families and responsibilities to add another mouth to feed.
For some, like that youngster, abortion is a casual convenience. But for many it’s literally life-and-death.
The Janes have a simple system of their own. Women call a phone number displayed on leaflets all over town. Someone answers and takes down their information onto cards. These are dispensed to volunteer “Janes” like Joy, who are responsibile for picking the woman up, taking her to a shabby hotel room where their shabby doctor (Cory Michael Smith) is set up for the procedure, then taking them to Virginia’s place afterward to rest and get a bowl of spaghetti.
There are a number of moral and logistical challenges to the group. Chief among them is that the doctor charges $600 — that’s about $5,000 in today’s dollars — and many women cannot afford it.
This leads to arguments within the group about who they’re serving and why. Gwen (Wunmi Mosaku), who was Joy’s “Jane,” begrudges that most Black women are being pushed aside. A radical nun insists they should be making determinations based on the person’s potential to contribute to society.
Later, a cop (John Magaro) shows up on Joy’s door, asking all sorts of probing questions and seeming to know everything going on, and we think it’s going to be the usual shakedown ordeal.
Instead, director Phyllis Nagy, an Oscar nominee for her screenplay for “Carol,” and screenwriters Hayley Schore and Roshan Sethi continually surprise us by never seeming to take the most expected turn. The women we encounter are fleshy and three-dimensional, and don’t behave in neatly plot-convenient ways.
Weaver’s Virginia is full of contradictions, a cynical do-gooder who knows how to grease the palms of the local mob but can’t see the limitations of the arrangement she has cooked up. She’s been around the block and understands that just because somebody is on your “side” doesn’t mean they’re incapable of maltreatment.
“Turns out the rads are bigger pigs than the pigs,” she says.
It’s an assured performance from Banks, who portrays Joy not as an uber-confident martyr but a simple upper-middle-class woman, someone who isn’t ashamed of her unearned comforts but still has a tendency to minimize her own capabilities. Early on, we learn that she writes Will’s closing arguments for him. She feels guilty for sneaking around and serving him frozen dinners, but eventually finds a reservoir of resolve to stake out her own corner of the world.
If there’s a quibble, it’s the presence of a next-door neighbor, Lana, a depressive young widow played by Kate Mara. She’s always on her porch drinking and stewing, and her place basically becomes an overflow for whenever Joy’s family troubles start brewing, especially with her daughter, Charlotte (Grace Edwards), who resents that all her mom’s attention is flowing elsewhere.
Soon Will’s wandering over there looking for support, and the movie falls smack into the cliche traps it had been so meticulously avoiding. Just ugh. The whole subplot, and possibly even the Lana character, were better left on the editing room floor.
That false note aside, “Call Jane” is terrific at melding real history with fictional stand-ins.
Topically it seems like there couldn’t be better timing for this movie to come out. Check any suspicions: the screenplay has actually been loitering around for at least five years, and production ramped up and was delayed during COVID.
Whether you feel Roe vs. Wade was egregiously wrong on the law or not, here’s a portrait of the real-world impact faced by some women, then and now, when these decisions are taken out of their hands.