<\/p>\n
By Thomas Floyd<\/strong><\/p>\n Topicality is baked into the film \u201cCall Jane,\u201d director Phyllis Nagy\u2019s historical drama about a pre-Roe v. Wade network of underground abortion providers in late-1960s Chicago. <\/p>\n But for this undercooked endeavour, such relevance is more of a burden than a boon.<\/p>\n The real-life inspiration for this fictionalised tale \u2013 the Jane Collective, a women-run network that provided 11,000 abortions when the procedure was mostly illegal \u2013 is a genuine source of female empowerment. <\/p>\n Still, Nagy only occasionally imbues the proceedings with an urgency befitting the life-or-death stakes. Best known as the screenwriter behind 2015\u2019s \u201cCarol\u201c, a master class in romantic longing and slow-burn storytelling, the filmmaker (working from a slapdash screenplay by Hayley Schore and Roshan Sethi) strains to shepherd a narrative that zips along in a haze of under-served storylines.<\/p>\n That can\u2019t be blamed on star Elizabeth Banks, who portrays a housewife named Joy with a criminal-litigator husband (Chris Messina), a pubescent daughter (Grace Edwards) and a life-threatening pregnancy. <\/p>\n After seeing her appeal for a \u201ctherapeutic termination\u201d rejected by the hospital \u2013 a pointedly blunt scene in which the members of the all-male panel discuss the woman before them as if she\u2019s invisible \u2013 an incredulous Joy turns to the Jane Collective for a covert procedure.<\/p>\n That experience sparks a feminist awakening in Joy, who soon gets roped into joining the \u201cJanes\u201d as a volunteer. <\/p>\n Banks sells the transformation from tightly wound housewife to secret women\u2019s rights advocate, though the actress is at her best when Joy is amusingly squirming in discomfort during her early days with the Janes \u2013 even if the script promptly sweeps that initial consternation under the rug.<\/p>\n Sigourney Weaver plays the collective\u2019s tough-love founder with palpable pluck and world-weariness. Wunmi Mosaku does a lot with a little with her character, an impassioned activist pushing for the group to better serve Black women. <\/p>\n Cory Michael Smith is sufficiently sleazy as the Jane Collective doctor who is only in it for the money \u2013 and may not, in fact, be a physician at all. (His coldly methodical oversight of Joy\u2019s abortion makes for a striking, if difficult, scene.) <\/p>\n But Messina can\u2019t quite get a grip on the patriarchy-pushing Will, whose marital devotion cracks when Joy becomes too busy with her clandestine activism to put dinner on the table. <\/p>\n And Kate Mara is woefully underused as the pill-popping widow next door who cozies up to Will amid Joy\u2019s increasingly frequent absences.<\/p>\n Although the deception predictably comes to a head, as Joy\u2019s husband and daughter act on their suspicions that something is awry, \u201cCall Jane\u201d tidies that mess with baffling brevity. <\/p>\n The same goes for the conflict over the Jane Collective\u2019s approach to race, which is broached and resolved so swiftly that the entire sub-plot reads like a last-minute rewrite. <\/p>\n A debate in which the Janes futilely attempt to assign a limited number of free abortions \u2013 tragically weighing patients\u2019 hardships against one another \u2013 only scratches the surface of that deeper dilemma.<\/p>\n The result is a film that\u2019s engaging enough but choppily paced and oddly inert. Beyond an audacious opening shot and some period-appropriate needle drops \u2013 Nancy Sinatra, Malvina Reynolds and Vanity Fare among them \u2013 \u201cCall Jane\u201d is also decidedly un-stylish. <\/p>\n After the movie premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January, several months before the Supreme Court overturned 1973\u2019s Roe v. Wade, the parallels between the Jane Collective\u2019s battle to protect women\u2019s rights and current activists\u2019 newfound fight to restore them are even starker now \u2013 making it all the more disheartening that \u201cCall Jane\u201d doesn\u2019t quite ring true.<\/p>\n \u201cCall Jane\u201d is showing at cinemas, nationwide. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Thomas Floyd Topicality is baked into the film \u201cCall Jane,\u201d director Phyllis Nagy\u2019s historical drama about a pre-Roe v. Wade network of underground abortion providers in late-1960s Chicago. But for this undercooked endeavour, such relevance is more of a burden than a boon. The real-life inspiration for this fictionalised tale \u2013 the Jane Collective, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1237571","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-celebrity-gossip"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1237571","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1237571"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1237571\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1237571"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1237571"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1237571"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}