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    Sigourney Weaver Has Us All Fooled: She’s Really Quite Silly

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    In her life onscreen, Sigourney Weaver has faced down ghosts, aliens and serial killers, romanced the likes of Harrison Ford and Mel Gibson and studied the clannish movements of gorillas in the mist and of suburban swingers in Connecticut. But before you knew her for any of those feats, an outrageous stage performance bestowed a lesson that has spanned the length of her five-decade career.“It was so good for me,” Weaver said, “to play a girl with a hedgehog in her vagina for a few months.”The year was 1976, and the production was “Titanic,” an Off Broadway play by Weaver’s frequent stage collaborator Christopher Durang (not her frequent film collaborator, James Cameron, who would make his own, very different “Titanic” two decades later). Durang’s sex farce asked her to play roles that ran the gamut from a black widow with deep décolletage to a pigtailed girl hiding a hedgehog in her vagina. The New York Times, in an amused review, described Weaver as “a cover girl beauty with a dry wit” and the play’s principal attraction.But what’s all that praise worth when weighed against one withering comment? One night, after an Actors Studio teacher came to see “Titanic,” Weaver asked for his take on her performance.“Well,” he sniffed, “I didn’t really feel that you had a hedgehog in your vagina.”This season Weaver will be seen in four very different roles, including a teenager in “Avatar: The Way of Water” and an abortion-rights activist in “Call Jane.”Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesUndone by the criticism, Weaver spent the next day overthinking things. Every waking minute was devoted to imagining the hedgehog and mapping out the little creature’s wants and desires; by the time she was onstage that night, throwing her leg onto a table to feed the hedgehog some lettuce, she could swear she felt a real animal moving to claim its prize.And how was all that hard work received? “There was not a laugh in the house,” she said. “It was absolute stone-cold horror.”Well, the performance earned one laugh, at least — a rueful, belated one from Weaver herself, as we sat by the beach at the Venice Film Festival in August. “I think the Actors Studio and comedy may not go together,” she told me, chuckling.Acting can sometimes be a battle between intellect and instinct, and by either measure, the 73-year-old Weaver is formidable. Co-stars talk about the way she marks up her scripts, scribbling down the motivations behind every line, action or lifted prop; onscreen, she projects that intelligence in a calm, cool way and can handily outthink any scene partner. But Weaver’s natural instincts have proved important, too, ever since her first starring role as the resourceful Ellen Ripley in the 1979 sci-fi classic “Alien.”“She’s reduced to instinct and survival, and goes from this person who knows the rules to someone who’s just flying by the seat of her pants,” Weaver said. “So I got a very good drenching in that right away.”The Return of ‘Avatar’The director James Cameron takes us back to the world of Pandora for the sequel “Avatar: The Way of Water.”What to Know: The sequel opens on Dec. 16, 13 years after “Avatar” shattered box office records. If you remember little about the original movie, here is a refresher.Holding Their Breath: Cameron and the sequel’s cast discussed what it took to get the new “Avatar” made and to bring it to life in a changed world.Sigourney Weaver: Hollywood has never quite known what to do with the actress, who has four films out this season, including the “Avatar” sequel. She spoke to us about her unusually fluid career.Back to the Theater: To help reacquaint audiences with the 3-D filmmaking that dazzled audiences in 2009, the first movie was rereleased in theaters on Sept. 23.Some things about Weaver are immutable, like her height (she stands nearly six feet tall) and honeyed voice, but she is credible in comedy, drama and action tentpoles and has put together an unusually fluid career that’s on full display this season. In September, you might have caught her in the indie comedy “The Good House,” in which she played Hildy, a witty, oft-soused real estate agent; the next month, New York Film Festival audiences met Weaver’s Norma, a wealthy woman having an affair with Joel Edgerton in the fraught, Paul Schrader-directed drama “Master Gardener.”Weaver can currently be seen as Virginia, an abortion-rights activist in the period drama “Call Jane” (out this weekend) and in December, she reunites with Cameron in “Avatar: The Way of Water,” despite the fact that her character died in the first film. Since the “Avatar” movies are shot mainly via motion capture, Cameron crafted a whole new role for Weaver, and it’s a corker: She plays Kiri, a 14-year-old, blue-skinned alien.It’s a role that reminded Weaver of her own adolescence and the winding path she has carved since. Born Susan Weaver to a television-executive father and actress mother in Manhattan, she picked the name Sigourney out of “The Great Gatsby” as a teenager, an act of willful reinvention in a life that would be full of such choices. “But I have gotten very far away from the intellectual person I was when I started my career,” she told me in Venice. “I’m pure instinct, and I’ve learned to trust those instincts.”Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.Weaver as a 14-year-old Na’vi girl in the “Avatar” sequel. Early on “I was very self-conscious and shy, so it wasn’t until I hit 14 — when I began to find my footing and I picked the name Sigourney — that my life actually began.”20th Century StudiosDoes this feel like an unusually prolific phase of your career?I’ve just been doing one film a year, but they’re all coming up at the same time as if I threw some magic beans out the window and suddenly there were all these great plants. But I’m happy about it because I’ve always secretly had this dream of being an actress in a repertory theater. Once that didn’t happen, I thought, “Doesn’t matter, I can do it myself. I’ll play the maid one day and the queen another, and I’ll keep jumping around, hopscotching from one genre and one kind of role to another.” So it’s a lovely expression of my earliest dream.When you pick a role, is it informed by the last role you played?It’s never about the role for me, ever. It’s about the script, I don’t even care who the director is. I was an English major, I can’t help it: I know about structure — beginning, middle, end — and I know the story has to be about more than the people in it. If it doesn’t pass those tests, I don’t care how good you are, it’s not for me. The next thing is the director and their vision, and to work with someone who’s passionate. Not with someone who says, “Well, let’s get this over with.”You’ve had those experiences?Only a little. And that’s why I decided I would stay in New York, after going out to L.A. in the ’70s and waiting to be seen by casting people. I felt that in New York, we talked much more about the nobility of our profession, how important it was and also how much fun it was. And being around actors at that time in L.A., there was a real feeling that it wasn’t a noble profession, that you were there to get famous or something. I found it all too confusing, so I went back.Tell me about playing Virginia, the abortion-rights activist in “Call Jane.”Virginia seemed to pop right out of me. I could have been Virginia in another life, I just felt her rangy style in my body. But it was very hard to get the movie financed. We tried to shoot it in other states, and no state wanted us, and Connecticut finally gave us a place to shoot.Were those states rejecting the film because it was about abortion?Maybe they didn’t like the script either, but it certainly was the subject matter. They didn’t want to be tarred with that.A prelude of events to come.Such a prelude, and I didn’t see it coming. I just thought, “Well, it was probably a conservative mayor, or whatever.” I didn’t see the big picture.Opposite Elizabeth Banks in “Call Jane.” Weaver said it was hard to find a state to film in, in large part because the subject was abortion. Officials “didn’t want to be tarred with that.”Wilson WebbDo you remember your political awakening as a young woman?Freshman year, I arrived at Sarah Lawrence, and a bunch of girls were burning their bras — I thought, “Oh, that’s interesting.” It was quite an exciting place, and I happened to be at college during a very political time. Almost every spring there would be protests, sit-ins. Every time I talked about politics, my father [Sylvester “Pat” Weaver, the creator of the “Today” and “Tonight” shows] would say, “Are you on drugs?” And I’d say, “No, not yet. Give me time.”Did you grow up in a conservative family?Well, my parents seemed quite conservative. I worked for a Republican congressman on Capitol Hill for a summer, but I never voted for a Republican. I think as an artist, we tell these stories about self-expression, about the people’s welfare and how vulnerable they are, and I don’t know how you could be a Republican and tell the stories that actors tell. I’m sure I’m wrong, I’m sure there are lots of Republicans that could, but you have to be able to play anyone, which forces you to have compassion for people with other positions and reinforces your conviction that people need freedom.What were you like at 14, the age you play in “Avatar: The Way of Water”?It was a period of my life when my parents were traveling a lot, and I felt a little like a lost soul. I was this tall when I was 12, and I was very self-conscious and shy, so it wasn’t until I hit 14 — when I began to find my footing and I picked the name Sigourney — that my life actually began. I remember so well being that age, and to be given an opportunity to revisit that in a safe way is a great gift, isn’t it?The role is motion-capture. Do you recognize yourself in Kiri, or does the character seem like someone else?I’ve only seen a couple of scenes, but all I hope is that it’s truthful. When I would do my warm-up, I was able to drop 60 years and feel the 14-year-old bubbling up, and then I just let her go.Does she fall in love?I don’t know if I can answer that question. I know that she just wants to be with Spider, a human boy, all the time. Even though she’s seven feet tall and he’s a human, they just complement each other. He actually puts blue on himself to pass, but I don’t think she notices much else besides the fun of being with him and being in the forest. They’re just free urchins at the beginning, and they have a kind of golden life there, even though they’re at war and in hiding.“If you’re tall, people expect you to be more mature, and for many, many years, I was not that.”Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesNorma, the character you play in “Master Gardener,” is at the other end of the spectrum. She makes every situation so fraught — even the way she wields a wine glass is like it’s a loaded gun.She’s certainly one of my favorites. Norma is a really complex character — I saw her referred to as icy, but I think she’s a cauldron.She can operate at a remove, but it’s not an icy remove.I’m so glad you see that because I think there’s a tendency to dismiss older women and, if they’re wealthy, to refer to them as icy. It’s one of the best parts I’ve ever had, but I’ve always avoided that kind of character.She’s a fun character to watch, because she’ll so often say or do something that’s wildly inappropriate.It’s one of the best roles I’ve ever had because she is so complex and was never meant to be one thing. There used to be so much emphasis on playing a woman sympathetically, and they only do it to women — nobody worries about the man being sympathetic. Also, I must say, it’s great to play competent women who still have sex lives. It’s something that didn’t used to happen that much in the old days, so I feel very optimistic for me and my peers that as long as they make good stories, older women are going to be a part of it, because they are very powerful in our real lives.When do you feel most powerful in your own life?Gosh, I’m not sure I know how to answer that. Powerful. Well, the Supreme Court decision made me feel very un-powerful, and I think that’s what a lot of women are feeling.In the 1980s, as you were coming into your own as a movie star, did you feel powerful?Whenever I used to go to Hollywood and have to deal with these different studio heads, I was never comfortable. I always felt incredible sexism there, and a kind of resentment that they had to listen to me because I did have this power and I was smart enough to put several sentences together. I used to think, “Oh, it would be fun to direct, but I don’t want to have to deal with those people.”I remember I was trying to raise money for our theater [she was a founder of the Flea Theater in New York], and I asked a studio I have a good connection with if they would make a charitable donation. And they said, “You know what we’ll do? We’re going to give you a bonus, and you can sign that over to your theater.” I said, “It’s not really the same thing. I can make my own charitable contribution.” I was so astonished by their lack of interest, and you’d think after several movies together that there’d be some kind of mutual respect.“I have gotten very far away from the intellectual person I was when I started my career,” Weaver said.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesIn a 1994 interview, you said, “I always felt a little bit illegitimate. Whenever they talked about serious actresses, I always felt that I had one foot in the land of Arnold Schwarzenegger, one foot in the land of Ivan Reitman and maybe a toe in the land of Meryl Streep and Glenn Close.”If you’re a woman, they want to know, are you a babe? Are you a comedian? Are you this or are you that? They didn’t know what to do with me. It was always off-the-track directors who would wake up in the middle of the night and go, “Oh, Sigourney Weaver, she could do this.” And then these things would come to me out of nowhere.After “Alien,” I was sent all these serious-person scripts and most of what I’d done was comedy onstage. I thought, “God, when am I going to get back to that?” That has been frustrating because a good comedy is hard to find, and so are love stories — I love them, but they couldn’t really imagine me in a love story. If I came in the room, all the producers would sit down, and if there was a leading man, he’d usually sit down, too, because they wanted someone different, someone much smaller.Did you feel pigeonholed because of your height?If you’re tall, people expect you to be more mature, and for many, many years, I was not that. I think because of my career, I’ve kind of fooled people into thinking that I’m a serious person. There are some things I feel quite serious about, but in general, I’m on the silly side. I think that’s why I love working with Jim Cameron — if it’s an adventure, let me at it. But this is something any actor has to deal with. Anytime a movie registers, you get 10 more offers like that — after “Ice Storm” [1997] I got so many mean, cold ladies. I think the only recourse is just find things to surprise yourself, and you’ll surprise your audience.What’s a good example of that?They didn’t want to see me for “Galaxy Quest” [1999], but I thought, “This is my chance to show my own insecurity when I go out to L.A.,” because no matter who you were, [Hollywood] could make you feel as vulnerable as [her character] Tawny feels. It was one of the reasons I made her such a babe: Babes should have all the friends in the world, but I’m not sure they feel secure about that because they think it’s only skin-deep when it’s not.So now that you have planted these magic beans, and by sheer luck they’ve all bloomed at the same time, what do you do with this garden that you have outside your window?I don’t want to pick it! Probably no one will get as much enjoyment out of these four films as I do. Imagining Norma and Hildy and Virginia and Kiri together, I just feel like I hit the jackpot, man.I would love to see those four characters in a room. Who would get along?I’m not sure what Kiri would think being in a room like that — I’m sure she’d find Norma completely terrifying. I guess it would depend on what kind of wine Hildy brought to the gathering. More

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      ‘Call Jane’ Review: Abortion History That’s Being Repeated Now

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      A fictionalized drama about the Jane Collective, a clandestine group that helped women secure safe, illegal abortions before 1973, is of the moment.When I first saw “Call Jane” in January, I filed it away as an appealing if familiar period piece, more dusty than revelatory. It’s a fictionalized drama about the Jane Collective, a real-life clandestine Chicago group that, starting in the late 1960s, helped women secure safe, illegal abortions, stopping only in 1973 with the Roe v. Wade decision. Watching it again recently, four months after the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to an abortion, it felt like a different film. History can do that to a movie — and to a critic.The aesthetic qualities of “Call Jane” haven’t changed since my first viewing, of course. It’s an intimate, fine-looking work that has a lightly grainy visual texture (it was shot on film) and the usual era-appropriate swinging hair, skirts and the like. The director, Phyllis Nagy, making her feature film debut, has embraced unobtrusiveness as a style, perhaps to soft-pedal the material. She doesn’t overuse close-ups or indulge in irritating contemporary habits: The camera doesn’t hover pointlessly, there are no self-aggrandizing crane shots. The cast is as appealing as I remembered it; the awkward scenes still jar as do the upbeat music choices.Written by Hayley Schore and Roshan Sethi, the movie focuses on a fictional character, Joy (a solid Elizabeth Banks), a genial pregnant housewife with a nice husband, a teenage daughter, a pleasant home and not much else going on. Shortly after the movie opens, Joy’s doctor tells her that she has a heart condition that will probably kill her unless her pregnancy is terminated. Because abortion is criminalized in Illinois, she is forced to petition a hospital board to obtain one. At the meeting, her doctor makes the case for her — she brings a tight smile and some home-baked goodies — but the all-male board votes against providing the procedure, deeming that there’s a 50 percent chance Joy will survive the pregnancy.Joy is an appealing character, but she’s also about the most anodyne emblem for abortion rights imaginable: a pretty lady with a life-threatening condition who wants to carry her pregnancy to term but can’t. Nagy tries to push the story beyond its cautious framing, but it’s tough going. She wrote Todd Haynes’s “Carol” — about two women in love in the early 1950s — and here shows a similar interest in exploring the smooth surfaces of repression. The first time that you see Joy, she is floating through a hotel like a soap bubble. Chicly dressed with a complicated upsweep that evokes Hitchcock’s blondes, she moves as if in a trance all the way through the front doors, where she sees people rioting. It’s 1968, and youth is in revolt.Joy soon is too, if slowly. She begins pushing back and breaking free after the medical board’s initial ruling, first by claiming to be suicidal so she can obtain a therapeutic abortion. She keeps pushing, and when she discovers the Jane Collective, the movie settles into a liberation story about women, emancipation, autonomy and power. Before long, Joy has joined the activist ranks of a vibrant organization made up of gutsy, opinionated, mouthy law-breakers, most notably Virginia and Gwen — the spiky tag team of Sigourney Weaver and Wunmi Mosaku — characters who amp the energy considerably. No more nice girls, well, almost.“Call Jane” squeezes a lot into its two hours, tethering Joy’s coming-into-consciousness arc to gobs of family drama, a touch of thriller-style intrigue (the Jane activists are always dodging the cops), legal questions, the larger political landscape (enter Nixon) and internecine feminist debates. Both Virginia and Gwen have to explain far too much, with each delivering chunks of exposition that are clearly more for the benefit of the movie’s audience than for any of its characters. Gwen, as the pre-eminent Black member in the collective, carries an additional burden because she has to deliver a righteous lecture about race and intersectionality, a lesson that the filmmakers should have heeded better themselves.If the references to race and class feel ritualistic, it’s because the movie largely centers on one woman, a focus that’s profoundly at odds with the political radicalism of the Jane’s collectivism. The real organization used Jane as a code name, as a generic moniker for a group of radicals, many of them veterans of the civil rights movement, who were risking everything, including prison, to help women. Some of that background filters into “Call Jane,” but the movie’s embrace of the traditional heroic narrative is exasperating and does a disservice to the history it relates. To borrow the title of a relevant book, it’s “Our Bodies, Ourselves.”So, should you see “Call Jane”? You bet. And not just because it’s satisfying to watch Banks, Weaver, Mosaku et al as feminists fighting the patriarchy with wit, intelligence and medical know-how. This is a story that needs to be told, again and again. The Jane Collective has been the subject of several documentaries, including the very engaging recent one, “The Janes,” but in the years between Roe’s passage and overturning, fictional movies have largely avoided abortion and specifically avoided it as a means of female emancipation.“Call Jane” helps modestly correct that sorry history by showing women organizing, raising consciousness and helping one another at great personal cost. In many ways it’s a process movie. It’s also eerily of the moment. Because, by the time I saw the film a second time, its vision of direct action no longer looked musty, but instead resembled the new underground abortion networks operating in states that have banned abortion. It looked like now.Call JaneRated R for language and cannabis. Running time: 2 hours 1 minute. In theaters. More

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      Sundance Film Festival: ‘Nanny’ Leads a Parade of Scares

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      When a character took a severed human leg out of a fridge in the horror movie “Fresh,” I laughed then hit pause. I had that luxury because, like everyone else this year, I didn’t have to fly to Utah for the Sundance Film Festival but attended this impressively sanguineous edition at home. So I just fast-forwarded to the leg chopper’s grisly comeuppance. As to the movie, it will do fine without my love: It’s already racked up positive reviews and will be released on Hulu, which is owned by Disney because, well, sometimes dreams really do come true.That human shank was part of a colorful parade of body parts on display at this year’s Sundance, which included a veritable charnel house of severed limbs, decapitated heads and disemboweled guts. The specter of the horror maestro David Cronenberg haunts “Resurrection,” a not entirely successful creepfest with an excellent Rebecca Hall, while other movies owed a conspicuous debt to Jordan Peele’s 2017 Sundance hit “Get Out,” notably “Master” (about a Black student and professor at a white-dominated college) and “Emergency,” an entertaining nail-biter about three friends trapped in a white nightmare.A scene from the comedy-turned-thriller “Emergency.”via Sundance InstituteI didn’t love “Fresh,” which uses a captivity freakout to dubious feminist ends, though I may have enjoyed it with more company. Watching horror movies alone isn’t the same as being in a theater filled with other people, including at Sundance. There, the audience tends to be already super-amped-up and excited just to be in the room, seeing a movie for the first time and often with the filmmakers in attendance. The hothouse atmosphere of festivals can be misleading and turn mediocrities into events, certainly, but the noisy clamor of such hype is always outweighed by the joys of experiencing discoveries and revelations with others.This is the second year that Sundance has been forced to jettison its in-person plans because of the pandemic. The festival had instituted sound vax and mask protocols, and the Utah county where Sundance takes place has a higher vaccination rate than either New York or Los Angeles. But Utah also had the third-highest rate of Covid-19 infections in the country as of Monday, as The Salt Lake Tribune recently reported. And, frankly, given how often I had returned home from Sundance with a bad cold or the flu (including a whopper of a mystery bug that flattened me in 2020), I didn’t bother to book another overpriced condo.Rebecca Hall in “Resurrection,” a creepfest with a debt to David Cronenberg.Wyatt Garfield, via Sundance InstituteInstead, I moved into my living room, hooked my laptop to my TV and streamed from the festival’s easy-to-use website. In between movies, I texted some of the same colleagues I hang out with at Sundance when we’re in Park City. In 2020, we had shared our love for “Time,” Garrett Bradley’s documentary about a family’s struggle with the American prison system. (I sat out the festival’s 2021 edition.) This year, we again traded must-sees and must-avoids. “I told you how awful it is,” my friend chided me about “You’ll Never Be Alone,” a shocker about a witch. She had, sigh. We also kept returning to a favorite: “Wow Nanny,” she texted. Oh, yes.A standout in this year’s U.S. dramatic competition, “Nanny” was another one of the selections that I deeply regretted not seeing with an audience, for both its visceral shocks and its lush beauty. In this case, I would have stayed put in my seat, just as I did at home, where pesky domestic distractions can make paying attention a struggle, especially when a movie isn’t strong enough to fully hold you. That was never a problem with “Nanny,” which kept me rapt from the start with its visuals and mysteries, its emotional depths and the tight control that the writer-director Nikyatu Jusu maintains on her material.Set in New York, the story centers on Aisha (the excellent Anna Diop), a Senegalese immigrant who’s recently accepted a nanny position. Her new workplace, a luxurious sprawl as sterile as a magazine layout, sets off immediate alarm bells, as do the overeager smiles and obsessive instructions of her tightly wound white employer, Amy (Michelle Monaghan). The setup recalls that of “Black Girl,” the Senegalese auteur Ousmane Sembène’s 1966 classic film about the horrors of postcolonialism. It’s an obvious aesthetic and political touchstone for Jusu, who nevertheless quickly and confidently spins off in her own direction.Like a number of other selections in this year’s festival, “Nanny” is a horror movie with a profound difference; unlike too many other filmmakers, Jusu never becomes boxed in by genre. Instead, horror-film conventions are part of an expansive tool kit that includes narrative ellipses, an expressionistic use of bold color and figures from African folklore, including a trickster in spider form and a water spirit called Mami Wata. Here, clichés like the oppressive house, controlling employer and vulnerable heroine prove far more complex than they appear, having been skillfully reimagined for this anguished, haunted story.Women in peril are familiar screen figures, but this year there was some honest variety in the kinds of directors putting knives to throats. At one point — in between streaming, smiling, grimacing, weeping and occasionally eww-ing at all the blood and guts — I realized that I hadn’t bothered to count the number of women and people of color in this year’s program. I was seeing enough fictional stories and documentaries with a range of different types of people that I hadn’t started compulsively profiling the filmmakers. Yes, there were a few Sundance reliables, the eternally cute and kooky white children of Indiewood, but not enough to trigger you about the old days when the festival was clogged with Tarantino clones.The drama “Call Jane” was one of two Sundance films about the Jane Collective, a group that helped women in Chicago obtain safe abortions.Wilson Webb, via Sundance InstituteThe auteurist touchstone at Sundance these days is Jordan Peele, whose radical use of the genre continues to feel relevant to the traumas of contemporary life. The preponderance of frightful tales in this program is obviously a matter of availability, cinematic copycatting and curatorial discretion. Given all the onscreen evisceration this year, I would imagine that the festival director Tabitha Jackson and the director of programming Kim Yutani have strong stomachs and senses of humor. That they’re also feminists surely, if gratifyingly, goes without saying and may help explain why there are three movies in the slate about abortion.The two I saw — the well-acted drama “Call Jane” and the solid, informative documentary “The Janes” — aren’t horror movies in the usual sense, but like more conventional examples of the genre, they also turn on the body, and specifically the female body, in peril. Each movie revisits the Jane Collective, a group of women and some men who from 1968 to 1973 helped women in Chicago obtain safe abortions before the procedure was a Constitutional right. And while the image of one member (Elizabeth Banks) in “Call Jane” learning how to administer abortions by practicing on pumpkins may not have been a Halloween joke, I laughed anyway.On a conspicuous, quantifiable level, this year’s program reaffirms that a genuine diversity of filmmakers also yields a welcome cinematic multiplicity. It can be easy to think of representation as an abstraction, as a political cudgel, a tedious rallying cry, a bore. Again and again this year, the sight of all these bodies, particularly of women — including Emma Thompson letting it all hang out beautifully in the gentle comedy “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande” — was a reminder that these representations aren’t boxes that were ticked off. They are the embodied truths, pleasures and terrors of women and people of color who, having long served as canvases for fantasies of otherness, have seized control of their own images. More

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      At Sundance, Two Films Look at Abortion and the Jane Collective

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      In the years leading up to Roe v. Wade, a Chicago group helped thousands of women obtain the procedure safely. A documentary and a feature tell their story.Judith Arcana was 27 and recently separated from her husband when she began driving women surreptitiously for safe — but illegal — abortions. The year was 1970, she was an out-of-work teacher on the South Side of Chicago, and she was spending her days counseling women in need.“I don’t think we were crazy,” said Arcana, now 78. “I don’t think we were stupid. I think that we had found something that was so important, so useful in the lives of women and girls.”“We were radicalized in the arena of women’s bodies,” she said. “We knew that what we were doing was good work in the world. And we knew that it was illegal.”Arcana was part of the Jane Collective, a disparate, rotating group of women who ensured safe abortions for thousands of women in Chicago between 1968 and 1973. Despite the law, women were still getting abortions. But they were often performing them on themselves and winding up in the hospital, or paying the mob with no guarantee of survival.During these years, because of Arcana and other women, if you lived in Chicago and needed help, you could call a number and talk with a woman who would offer a safer alternative. Members of the collective provided counseling and arranged the procedures, which they eventually administered — 11,000 all told during that period. But then in 1972, Arcana and six other members of the group were arrested, each charged with 11 counts of abortion or conspiracy to commit an abortion with a possible 10-year sentence for each charge. Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision issued in 1973, saved them all.Mugshots of members of the Jane Collective who were arrested in 1972. HBONow, close to 50 years later, members of the collective are sharing their stories in a pair of movies at the Sundance Film Festival, which begins Thursday: the HBO documentary “The Janes”; and a fictionalized account titled “Call Jane,” starring Elizabeth Banks and Sigourney Weaver, and looking for distribution.The movies are debuting at a particularly crucial time for abortion rights. The Supreme Court heard arguments in December over the legality of a Mississippi law that bans abortion after 15 weeks; it is expected to issue a decision this summer. Should the court uphold the law, the ruling would be at odds with Roe v. Wade, which declared abortion a constitutional right and forbade states from banning the procedure before fetal viability (23 weeks). The Sundance filmmakers make no secret that they support abortion rights but say they want their work to show the complexity of the subject.In “Call Jane,” Banks plays Joy, a mother and housewife who seeks out an illegal abortion after learning that her pregnancy is life-threatening — her attempt to secure one legally having been denied by an all-male hospital board. The movie’s director, Phyllis Nagy (whose credits include the screenplay for “Carol”), said she wished she could show it to the Supreme Court’s conservative justices. “I would sit there and say, ‘Now, talk to me,’ and it wouldn’t make any difference, probably,” she said. “But artists need to start having the kinds of political conversations with society that aren’t didactic,” she added. “Nothing else has worked.”Elizabeth Banks in “Call Jane,” about a woman trying to terminate a life-threatening pregnancy. Wilson Webb, via Sundance InstituteThe makers of “The Janes” hope those with differing views will allow themselves a look at life before Roe v. Wade. “This is a glimpse at history; I don’t think it’s an advocacy film,” said Tia Lessin, who directed with Emma Pildes, whose father used to be married to Arcana. Arcana’s son, Daniel, and Pildes are producers on the film. Lessin added, “It’s a real life story about what happened and the lengths that women went to to have abortions and to enable other women to have abortions.”“Do I hope that people’s takeaway will be ‘let’s not go back there’? Sure. But I really hope it moves people to engage in conversation. Love the film, hate the film,” she said before Pildes jumped in: “Talk about the issue.”And there is plenty to discuss.The Jane Collective was formed when a college student, Heather Booth, now 76, received a desperate call from a friend looking for an abortion. Booth, active in the civil rights movement, found a doctor willing to help and passed along the information. “I made what I thought was a one-time arrangement,” she said in an interview. Soon another woman called. Then another. Booth found herself negotiating fees and learning the intricacies of the procedure so she could counsel women. After a few years, Booth, by then a mother working on her graduate degree at the University of Chicago, recruited others to fulfill the growing need.“I was working full time. The number of calls were increasing. It was certainly too much for one person,” she added.Marie Leaner, now 80, was raised Roman Catholic and taught to believe that abortion was a sin. At a community center on the West Side of Chicago, she ran a program for teenage mothers. “I just thought it was atrocious that these women didn’t want to carry the babies but they felt this was their punishment for being in love or being sexually involved with someone,” she recalled. “I decided I wanted to do something about it.”She offered up her apartment for the procedures and occasionally held the hands of the women who came through. As one of the few Black women in the group, she said, “I knew that Black and brown people wouldn’t partake of the service if they couldn’t see themselves involved in it.”The State of Abortion in the U.S.Card 1 of 5Abortion at the Supreme Court. More