Wilson Webb/Sundance Institute
MOVIE REVIEW
Call Jane (2022)
Years ago, this critic attended a talk by Euzhan Palcy, director of “A Dry White Season,” the 1989 antiapartheid box-office bomb that was the first major Hollywood production directed by a Black woman. She told a roomful of righteous undergraduates that she centered Donald Sutherland’s character because his was the one with the story arc; all the Black characters already knew of the atrocities keeping the apartheid regime in power and that racism is bad. She calmly explained that you have to start from the beginning every time, because there will always be people who simply don’t think they are affected by something like racism, and the constraints of a movie’s running time mean it’s more interesting to focus on the people who need to change. That same logic went into the choices that make up “Call Jane,” a major Hollywood production about why abortion is good. Should we need to start from the beginning on this subject? Of course we do. And when it’s done this well, it speaks for itself.