‘Walls’ Looks at Changes in Attitudes Toward Abortion

“Listen, honey, if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament,” Gloria Steinam says in one of the opening scenes of HBO’s “If These Walls Could Talk.” Her curt, provocative statement is from a film clip from the 1960s--and a particularly appropriate inclusion in a montage segment that sets the stage for a three-part drama dealing with abortion.

But the most convincing moments in this richly textured television film have less to do with the anger present on both sides of the contentious issue than they do with the complex web of unavoidable personal emotion that envelops any consideration of pregnancy termination.

The picture, which stars Demi Moore, Sissy Spacek and Cher, consists of three stories, held together by the dramatic artifice of having them take place in the same house over a 40-year period. The device effectively underscores the changes in societal attitudes toward abortion that have emerged between the ‘50s and the ‘90s. But there is otherwise no linkage between what are, essentially, three short stories.

In Part 1, which is set in 1952, Moore plays a young, widowed nurse desperately in search of an abortion at a time when the illegality of the procedure drove women to extreme, often life-threatening measures. Moore gives a focused, carefully detailed rendering of her character in a story that simply and candidly illustrates the frightening isolation that greeted women in her situation during the years prior to Roe vs. Wade.

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Part 2, from 1974, features Spacek as a mother of four who believes her childbearing years are over. When she discovers she is again pregnant, she must grapple with the possibility of giving up a long-awaited dream to return to her abandoned university education. The thoughtfully delineated script (by Susan Nanus and director Nancy Savoca), along with Spacek’s multilayered performance--the finest in the film--provides the most insightful view of the contradictory tugs and pulls of the abortion question.

Part 3, set in the present, focuses upon a young, pregnant college student and her efforts to consider abortion at a clinic that is under siege by anti-abortion activists. Ann Heche contributes a superb interpretation of the student’s traumatic ups and downs. But the believability of the segment suffers from the script’s (and, presumably, director Cher’s) attempt to paint too large a canvas.

Even granting the desire to supply varying points of view, the multiplicity of opinionated characters and the distracting, fast-cut editing style simply overload a small, tellingly intimate tale with the weight of the entire panorama of abortion in the ‘90s.

The film was produced by Moore and Suzanne Todd, and directed--with impressive concern for period particulars--by Savoca (Parts 1 and 2) and Cher (Part 3).

* “If These Walls Could Talk” can be seen Sunday at 9 p.m. on HBO.