When screenwriter Phyllis Nagy began working on her directorial debut, Call Jane, Roe v. Wade had not yet been overturned. Now, watching the historical drama about a network of underground American abortion providers is by turns bittersweet and infuriating. However, the film's focus on its white middle-class protagonist, as well as its lukewarm attempts to appeal to a wide audience, fail to provide the rousing call to action that we need in 2022.
Set in 1968, this film follows the feminist awakening of Joy (Elizabeth Banks), a suburban middle-class housewife whose life-threatening pregnancy was denied termination. Through her journey to stay alive, audiences witness the dangerous world of underground abortion.
“That’s bullshit,” I heard the woman next to me mutter to her friend during the particularly irritating scene when the all-male hospital board claimed the health of the baby was more important than that of its mother.
After receiving her abortion from ‘The Janes" — a group of women running an underground organization that provided illegal abortions — Joy is slowly integrated into the Call Jane initiative. Joy dives into a world of underground feminism, radicalism and ‘crime’ and transforms from a secluded housewife to front-running the organization, even performing the procedures herself.
The film does an excellent job at highlighting the complex factors of the underground abortion economy that are too easily forgotten, or suppressed, including medical exploitation and abortion doctors' prevalent ties to the mob.
However I couldn't help but feel that the struggles of The Janes as a collective should have been the main focus of the film, rather than one woman’s journey. Of course, there is also the fact that the lead is a white, wealthy, attractive housewife. At one point, the film states that “we are all Jane,” yet it is clear that Jane does not in fact represent all of us.
The film does address how many women were denied help from The Janes because they could not afford it, leaving mainly Black and marginalised women suffering the impacts of forced birth.
Because there was so much to pack into only two hours, many important details such as race, the doctors’ ties to the mob, or the other ladies part of The Janes were only mentioned for a moment.
Perhaps if the film had spent more time on the story of The Janes and less on Joy’s personal life it would have packed a harder punch. In some ways the film almost seemed “made for TV”: its light-hearted approach to deeply distressing subject matter seemed designed to make audiences feel good, rather than drastically challenging our world views.
The significance of Call Jane is apparent from the start: it gives insight into a dark world where a woman is valued less than her child, a world where in order to stay alive she must take incredible risks — a world which many of us in Canada and the US thought that we had left behind in the 20th century.
The film ends in 1973 when Roe v. Wade was originally passed, and it ends on a hopeful note. Now, that hope seems misplaced.