“Are you Jane?” It’s a question that Chicago housewife Joy (Elizabeth Banks) repeatedly asks, as she calls a number from a flyer, is picked up, blindfolded, driven to a nondescript office where she receives an illegal, but safe, abortion from an unfeeling doctor (Cory Michael Smith), and is then cared for by an eclectic group of women. In this group, no one is Jane, but they are all Jane, the generic alias that shields their identities becoming the de facto name for this underground network of women providing abortion care in the years before Roe v. Wade. In “Call Jane,” Oscar-nominated “Carol” screenwriter Phyllis Nagy, working with a script by Hayley Schore and Roshan Sethi, crafts an unconventional biopic, not of any real person, but of Jane, the collective.
That “Jane” was an alias, an avatar, is part of the problem with “Call Jane,” in which all of the fictionalized characters, from Joy, to Virginia (Sigourney Weaver), the organizer behind the group, to Joy’s husband Will (Chris Messina), to her daughter (Grace Edwards) and neighbor (Kate Mara), never really feel like real people, but indeed, avatars, merely representatives or devices to move the plot along.
Joy is an opaquely written character, a housewife who is never able to fully express her own wants, needs and desires. Banks, working with limited material, delivers a distinctive and stealthily effective performance, using Joy’s inexpressiveness as a character trait. She plays Joy as withdrawn and soft-spoken. Despite her demure exterior, Joy quietly slides in sly barbs loaded with double meaning about the unfairness of her position, whether it’s her husband complaining about frozen meatloaf, or before a panel of cartoonishly evil white male doctors, who deny her the right to the “therapeutic termination” of a pregnancy that’s threatening her life.
