"A positive is always a positive." — clinic nurse
You might expect a drama revolving around abortion to be emotionally charged and veer into melodrama. But writer/director Eliza Hittman (2017's Beach Rats) not only avoids current sociopolitical histrionics with Never Rarely Sometimes Always, she refuses to even take a side in the debate.
That's no mean feat.
Her story revolves around Autumn Callahan (Sidney Flanigan), a 17-year-old whose pregnancy test reveals her worst fear. Uncertain how to proceed, Autumn depends on a sympathetic network of women's clinics and on her cousin, co-worker and best friend Skylar (Talia Ryder), and the film is largely the story of their bond.
Where Autumn is unsure and trepidatious, Skylar is proactive and determined to help her cousin through to the best possible conclusion the situation will allow — even when that course of action impels the girls to take a bus from their rural Pennsylvania hometown to New York City, where a minor can get an abortion without parental consent. This immersion into a world alien to their small-town sensibilities doesn't help their anxiety.
Autumn feels she has no choice but to get an abortion. Exactly why is never really explored, even though, in the beginning of the film, we see a few scenes of her less-than-idyllic home life. There's even tacit suggestion that the father of her child could be her own chauvinistic stepfather.
If Hittman takes a stand on anything, it appears to be that all men are creeps. Autumn and Skylar live in a world characterized by toxic masculinity, humiliated in every quarter from their domestic environment to their workplace and beyond. Exploited and manipulated, the hardships they face are the result of a society where women are relegated to second place.
Hittman's screenplay is short on dialogue. There's no real explanation as to how Autumn and Skylar got where they are. In fact, probably the most talky scene occurs between Autumn and a social worker in a New York clinic, the scene from which the film derives its title. Even then, Flanigan's acting succeeds not through her ability to turn a phrase, but almost exclusively through body language, as she summarizes Autumn's painful history through her eyes instead and not her words.
Nevertheless, there are a few issues that affected my perception of Hittman's film — the first being that, while it's a smaller-budget independent film without any real star power to speak of, Never Rarely Sometimes Always was slated for a limited theatrical release. Because of the coronavirus outbreak, I was obliged to watch it at home. Not only did I miss the communal sharing of the experience with an audience, but the TV I watched it on was a 4K employing a 120 frame-per-second process known as interpolation, also called the soap opera effect. It's designed to minimize motion blur in high definition, but also imbues even movies shot on film with a glossy look, like cheap video.
I didn't want to reset the TV's setting because it wasn't mine. I'm concerned that the effect caused me not to appreciate Hélène Louvart's cinematography as much as I otherwise would have, but I suppose you could also argue that it contributed to the story's immediacy.
The other consideration is more personal. I couldn't help but consider the irony that here I was, watching a film about a girl pigeonholed into getting an abortion, while I was feeding a week-old baby his bottle of breast milk, the supply of which my daughter-in-law has exhausted herself to provide.
After 60 years on this planet, I respect the strength of women more and more every day.
Never Rarely Sometimes Always is available early via video-on-demand due to COVID-19.
