121 min | R | October 28, 2022 | Roadside Attractions
Chicago, 1968. A pregnant housewife with a heart condition needs an abortion that is illegal and a hospital board of men who refuse to grant it. She finds the women who do it anyway.
Joy is a comfortable suburban wife and former legal secretary whose wanted pregnancy threatens her life. The hospital board, all men, votes to let the pregnancy continue and gamble on her survival. A flyer with a phone number sends her to an underground network of women who arrange abortions for anyone who calls. Call Jane is the story of how Joy stops being a client and becomes part of the machinery. The film is less about the procedure than about a woman discovering competence she was never allowed to use.
Elizabeth Banks plays Joy as a woman learning to see her own life from the outside. She starts the film deferring to her husband and her doctors and ends it negotiating prices and counseling strangers. Banks keeps the transformation small and physical. Sigourney Weaver plays Virginia, the organizer who runs the network with cigarettes and contempt for sentiment. Weaver delivers her lines like a woman who has done the math on every favor and knows exactly what it costs. Wunmi Mosaku plays Gwen with a sharp impatience that pushes back on the group’s blind spots about who gets helped.
Phyllis Nagy directs her first feature with restraint that suits the material. Writers Hayley Schore and Roshan Sethi build the film around procedure and logistics rather than melodrama. The production design renders 1968 in muted browns and kitchen Formica without turning the period into a costume parade. The film’s most effective sequence is its first abortion, shot in close and quiet detail that refuses both squeamishness and spectacle. The camera treats the act as medical work, which is the entire argument.
Call Jane makes its case through accumulation. Phone calls, cash, car rides, and the slow expansion of a woman’s sense of what she can do. The back half loses some of that momentum as the network grows and the stakes flatten into repetition. The film never quite finds a second act to match the urgency of its first. It is a competent, well-acted account of a story that earns the telling, and it settles for clarity when it could have reached for more.