Mark Reviews Movies: CALL JANE

Call Jane, Roadside Attractions

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 27, 2022

The importance of a story is not only in its content and message. It's also—and, perhaps, more vitally—in the perspective from which that story is told. Take Call Jane, which looks at the Jane Collective, a Chicago-based organization that helped provide women with abortions from around 1965 until 1973. The medical procedure was illegal through most of the United States at that time, meaning anyone associated with the group risked arrest and significant prison time for being involved at any level.

This is the definition of a group effort, but Hayley Schore and Roshan Sethi's screenplay reduces the time, efforts, and struggles of who-knows-how-many people to the involvement of one person. That Joy (Elizabeth Banks), the suburban housewife at the center of the movie's story, is fictional is beside the point (Secrecy and anonymity were, after all, vital elements of the group's operation). That she becomes the entryway into the story of Jane (as the underground group was mostly called) and the key figure in everything about it takes away from every other voice that could be heard, as well as every other story that could be told, instead.

The perspective here is so narrow that it undermines the movie's central purpose, made blatant in a summation of an anticlimax that skips years of difficulties and legal battles for a feel-good ending that no longer sits right in the current political/judicial/legislative climate. That's not the filmmakers' fault, of course, but a broader scope of experience and point-of-view surely wouldn't have made this story, the fight happening along its periphery, and its easy resolution seem as simplistic as they are in director Phyllis Nagy's movie.

Joy begins, ends, and carries everything in between in this telling. She's married to Will (Chris Messina), an attorney who just made partner at his law firm, and has a teenage daughter named Charlotte (Grace Edwards). The family is also expecting a new baby in about six months or so, but after feeling lightheaded and passing out in the kitchen, a doctor informs Joy that she has a serious heart condition.

The pregnancy is making it worse. Despite the doctor's recommendation for an emergency termination of the pregnancy, the hospital board ignores that advice, ignores Joy's arguments, and votes against the procedure (One by one, they all vote with a "No," letting us know there's little subtlety to found in this movie, immediately after Joy asks if the woman's life matters in this situation).

Joy doesn't want to risk death, and eventually, she finds her way to Jane, run by Virginia (Sigourney Weaver) out of an apartment. After going through the potentially life-saving procedure, Joy becomes cautiously and, then, quite actively involved in the organization, lying to her family and friends to keep her participation as secret as possible.

This character's experience is just one of countless others like hers and completely different than her own, but since the plot retains its full attention on Joy, those other stories come only in snippets, as Joy assists Jane's only doctor (played by Cory Michael Smith), which seems unlikely and turns out to be dramatic license for some suspense later, in procedures and Jane's volunteers recite a few stories from abortion-seekers as they try to determine which of them they can help.

Instead of exploring or even listening to these experiences, though, most of the movie is devoted to Joy's political awakening as an activist. Meanwhile, she also navigates the difficulty of hiding her activity from Will, Charlotte, and her widowed neighbor Lana (Kate Mara). The result is a lot of build-up toward some melodramatic turns, as Will feels ignored by his wife (The neighbor character quickly and transparently is set up as the potential "other woman" here, and in the rush to resolve all of the complications, Schore and Sethi seem to forget that until the last possible moment) and the daughter suspects something might else might be going on other than the "art classes" her mother alleges to be taking. It's all unconvincing melodrama, made even more unbelievable as the truth comes to light, moral and political lines are drawn, and those divides disappear a few scenes later, simply because the story is coming to an end.

The actors aren't at fault, with Banks adding some genuine compassion to the character of questionable significance and Weaver's thoughtful, no-nonsense Virginia making the case that her character might have served as a better protagonist. The story of Call Jane, though, doesn't belong to one person, one particular circumstance, or one perspective, so a simple swap probably wouldn't correct the movie's central issue. Its main limitation is simply in its narrative limitations.

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