Call Jane, review: Elizabeth Banks is an exhilarating heroine in this fascinating slice of modern history
Call Jane is about a status quo for women’s rights that needed a massive overhaul, after all the noisy ferment of 1968, but before abortion was made legal in the USA by the landmark Roe vs Wade ruling in 1973. That five years is a fascinating window for political activism, but also a period, like any other, when women simply needed to live their lives. They had a multitude of reasons for ending pregnancies without any state-sanctioned way of doing so.
The main characters in this script, by Hayley Schore and Roshan Sethi, are fictional, but the film takes its name from an underground women’s movement in Chicago, which was active from 1969 until the moment it was no longer required. The volunteers of the Jane Collective would take calls, offer counselling, and arrange terminations for those who had nowhere else to turn: teenagers, rape victims, the critically ill. Where the medical establishment shunned them, and many were driven to dangerous back-street options or DIY, this right-on sisterhood welcomed them in with secrecy, knitted blankets and warming bowls of spaghetti straight after the deed was done.
One such woman is Joy (Elizabeth Banks), an unassuming housewife with a teenage daughter, who begins the film surprised to find herself pregnant for a second time. Before the end of the first trimester, she collapses with congestive heart failure, and is told that her chances of surviving the birth are 50/50. Even these odds aren’t enough to grant her the right to an emergency procedure, and her husband Will, a straight-arrow criminal litigator played by Chris Messina, has no other solution to offer.
Joy has a few up her sleeve. She forges Will’s signature on a cheque and cashes it for $1000 at a local bank. That’s enough to cover the costs of a back-street abortionist in Wicker Park, but she flees from the grimy clutches of the place on sight. A bus stop notice, in the rain, alerts her to the Janes, and she submits instead to their care. Mere minutes after her surgical ordeal, she meets their leader Virginia (Sigourney Weaver), a sort of practical high priestess in overalls, whose ability to call in favours has made the group a bastion for needy women across the state.
Weaver has a kind of humorous severity here: she’s stern but loving, towering benignly over most of the supporting cast. It’s a very good use of her. The casting uniformly clicks, for which a lot of the credit goes to director Phyllis Nagy, best-known in the film world for her perfect, Oscar-nominated Carol script. Joy was meant to be played by Elisabeth Moss, who had to drop out, but it’s such a Moss-ish role in its contours of feminist awakening that watching Banks play her generates more of a novel spark: she’s alert, funny and capable in all the ways you’d hope.
Funny? Perhaps this is Nagy’s signature coup. Her film has a swinging vitality that stops it feeling like hindsight finger-wagging. As Joy learns more about reproductive health, she starts paying her own body more attention. (The use of the track “What’s Goin’ On Down There”, by Malvina Reynolds, is a particularly choice moment on a generally killer soundtrack.)
Joy also realises where she could help the Janes out most of all. Their operation’s flawed because of the expensive, dubiously qualified male doctor (Cory Michael Smith) on whom they rely, with his thuddingly crass bedside manner. Smith’s cowboyish performance is a treat: the film could have made this guy a dullard or a drag, but instead he’s a cavalier opportunist whose game is up.
Once Joy starts to Vera Drake her own access into this game, she gains self-worth and a voice she’d previously suppressed. Without giving in to bromides, the cha-cha, surprisingly feel-good rhythms of Nagy’s direction make this heroine's sudden sense of purpose rather exhilarating.
Cert tbc, 121 min. Playing at the Sundance Film Festival. A UK release has yet to be announced
