Call Jane: Who Ya Gonna Call When You’re Pregnant in Pre-Roe v Wade America?

By Liam Lacey

Rating: B

The U.S. Supreme Court’s Dodd decision to rescind abortion as a constitutional right didn’t pass until June of this year. But it wasn’t unexpected.

Anti-abortion activists have had a series of legal successes in limiting abortion rights over the past decade.  Given that trend, it wasn’t surprising that that there were two films at Sundance this year about the history of the pro-choice movement.

What was unusual was that both films, Tia Lessin and Emma Pildes’ documentary, The Janes (currently on HBO) and the fictional film, Call Jane, which opens in theatres this weekend, were about the same underground Chicago women’s abortion collective of the late ‘60s and early ‘70.

Elizabeth Banks plays a lawyer’s wife, pondering a way out of her life-threatening pregnancy

The star power that Elizabeth Banks, Kate Mara and Sigourney Weaver bring to the story adds up to a degree of bankability that the description “abortion documentary” doesn’t convey. Banks holds the center of the film, with a warm seriousness, as Joy, a soigné suburban housewife in 1968 Chicago, who discovers her secret powers through a feminist abortion collective.

We first see her, viewed from behind, coiffed and elegant in a downtown hotel, where she’s helping her husband celebrate his promotion to partner at his law firm. The time is August, 1968, and outside the hotel there’s an historic Democratic Convention riot going on, seen in silhouette through the hotel’s glass doors.

That evening, Joy is feeling unwell, pregnant with a future sibling to her teen-aged daughter, Charlotte (Grace Edwards). But during an examination by her doctor, Joy discovers that she has a heart condition which could kill her if the pregnancy is carried to term. The all-male board at her hospital refuses to consider an abortion, reasoning that Joy’s baby, at least, could survive. Joy’s husband, Will (Chris Messina), seems more afraid of breaking the law than losing his wife.

Call Jane is directed by Phyllis Nagy who wrote the screenplay for Todd Haynes’s 2015 lesbian drama, Carol and directed the 2005 TV movie Mrs. Harris, about the Scarsdale murder case.  She has a knack for feminist-themed thrillers in which complacent privileged women are moved to passionate deeds.  

She’s not the writer of Call Jane, a joint effort by Hayley Schore and Roshan Sethi, a former Canadian doctor, who were creators of the FOX TV medical drama, The Resident.  

Nagy brings to the film a sense of mid-century, middle-class cautious chic, focused on hair, the cars, the dresses and furniture. Meanwhile, the well-chosen deep cut ‘60s musical selections on the soundtrack hint that boundaries are dissolving everywhere.

 In the afternoons, Joy shares drinks as she consoles her recently widowed friend, Lana (Mara). In the evening, Joy prepares dinner and edits and rewrites her husband’s legal briefs to advance his career. And in the morning, she panics and tries to plot to escape her pregnancy.

After forging one of her husband’s cheques (she doesn’t have her own bank account) Joy has enough cash to pay for a backstreet abortion, but loses her nerve at the last minute. Then she sees a flyer at a bus stop flyer with the words “Pregnant? Call Jane” and a phone number

For about the first third of its running time, Call Jane plays like a thriller, a tone is maintained through the teeth-on-edge no-anesthetic abortion scene. But there’s an element of quirkiness here, as the abortionist, Dean (Cory Michael Smith) is an arrogant young man with a bowl haircut in a doctor’s smock. Joy has, in a sense, gone through the looking-glass. 

Later, at a cozy apartment where Joy recovers with a blanket and a bowl of spaghetti, she discovers there is no one called Jane. Instead, there’s are an argumentative bohemian women’s co-operative, including a Catholic nun, who sit around, cook and answer the phones calls from desperate women.  

Their leader is a former civil rights activist named Virginia (Weaver), who sets the rules. (She’s loosely based on Heather Booth who, was in her twenties when she founded The Janes.).

Though she rules the group,  Virginia sometimes clashes with the only Black member of the group, Gwen (Wunmi Mosaku), who argues that brown and Black women face more economic challenges than their white counterparts. We also see the women arguing about the impossible triage decisions about who takes priority in the overbooked clinic, judged by age, rape, incest, or poverty. 

As a counter-balance to such grim concerns, there’s a rather silly scene where Virginia outsmarts Dean the doctor in a drunken game of strip-poker, where she convinces him to offer more free abortions to women in need.

The film loses momentum as it settles into movie-of-the-week familiarity, detailing the activities of the Jane collective, some of which seem hardly credible, though historically accurate.

It ends, logically and happily, at the start of 1973, with the passage of Roe vs Wade, guaranteeing womens’ rights to an abortion, at least until this year.

Call Jane, a narrow window into a complex story, is perhaps best appreciated as a gateway to a richer film, The Janes, a documentary that crackles with the energy and ambition of young rebellious women who provided an estimated 12,000 abortions for women in Chicago over a five-year period.

Both films remind us that the courts won’t stop women from getting abortions. It will just make those abortions far more dangerous.

Call Jane. Directed by Phyllis Nagy. Written by Hayle Schore and Roshan Sethi. Starring: Elizabeth Banks, Sigourney Weaver, Chris Messina, Kate Mara, Wunmi Mosaku, Corey Michael Smith, Grace Edwards and John Magaro. In theatres October 28.