‘Call Jane’ Should Be About Our Past, Not Our Present
With reproductive rights under attack and the Midterms looming ahead of us, Call Jane could not be more perfectly timed. The film should be a horror story about the past — a “thank God things are different now” kind of story. Instead, it is more of a manual in our present day.
Set in 1968 Chicago, Joy (Elizabeth Banks), a pregnant housewife is told that her pregnancy is causing her heart to fail, giving her only a 50% chance of survival if she carried to term. After the all-male medical board declines her request for this life-saving abortion because the baby’s life would be safe (“What about her mother?” Joy pleads to no avail), Joy becomes desperate to save her own life. Enter the Janes.
The Jane Collective was an underground network of women working to provide safe abortions for women from the late 1960’s to 1973 when Roe v. Wade was passed. Joy gets the abortion and then meets Virginia (Sigourney Weaver), the leader of the Janes. Virginia is strong, smart, and confident — everything Joy wants to be — and she soon enlists Joy to start working with the Janes herself.
Call Jane has its flaws. There is a noticeable lack of conflict as well as multiple side plots that are unnecessary and don’t serve the story. The stakes should be high — what if Joy’s husband and daughter find out about her secret life, or worse, what if the police find out? But the film seems afraid to dig deeper into these conflicts; everything runs smoothly and these conflicts dissipate into the background.
Joy’s neighbor, Lana (Kate Mara) is a character that could be lifted straight out of the film. She doesn’t add much of anything to the story except to be a prop in a neglected storyline involving an affair with Joy’s husband, Will (Chris Messina). Will himself only serves to show the casual sexism of the era and although he is set up as semi pro-life, this trait is hardly examined and abandoned by the end. In addition, Dean (Cory Michael Smith), the crude, capitalistic abortion doctor whose bedside manner leaves much to be desired, simply disappears halfway through the movie without any explanation.
Director, Phyllis Nagy, does an excellent job of showing the power the Janes have when working together to solve these problems that shouldn’t even exist. It shows the dangers that illegal abortion causes — at best, a greedy doctor operating outside of regulations, and at worst, women forced to do the unthinkable when they are unable to pay the Janes. In one heartbreaking scene, the Janes sift through the clients unable to pay, trying to decide which person is in most need of a free abortion.
It is quite unnerving that, in 2022, Call Jane is more of a manual than a look into the past. But as one of the protest posters reads at the end of the film, sisterhood is powerful, and I believe that this dark period in American history will only be a short one when women, and all people in need of abortions, come together and fight.
