‘Hollywood Does Abortion’ Review: Political Doc

Speaking about the abortion storylines of the 2010s, a media researcher remarks on how “divorced” Hollywood seemed from the “political reality” of the era.

On our shows, from Parenthood to Private Practice to Better Things, characters were freely exercising their right to choose, with support from sympathetic loved ones and reassuring medical professionals. Meanwhile, out in the real world, the rising Tea Party were passing a “tidal wave” of ever-tightening restrictions, turning those same scenes into increasingly inaccessible fantasies.

Hollywood Does Abortion, premiering at Tribeca, aims to close that gap. Combining news footage, expert interviews and a dizzying array of film and TV clips, the documentary makes the case for the inextricable relationship between pop culture and politics, each side shaping the other. If it necessarily prioritizes breadth over depth, its sharp insights make for a galvanizing start to a long-overdue conversation.

It helps that despite the often dispiriting subject matter, Hollywood Does Abortion, directed by Janet Goldwater, Barbara Attie and Mike Attie, is a surprisingly easy watch. The pacing is brisk but never hurried, and its leaps between eras or topics never feels difficult to follow, thanks to writer-editor Jamie Boyle’s well-organized narrative flow. Statistics are trotted out judiciously to make a clear statement, rather than thrown at us willy-nilly.

The talking heads include academics and activists as well as creatives like Crazy Ex-Girlfriend creator Rachel Bloom and Dirty Dancing writer Eleanor Bernstein, and the film allows both their expert knowledge and their personal perspectives to shine through. (In a pointed touch, nearly all of them are women.) In one minute, they might be thoughtfully pushing back against former President Bill Clinton’s “safe, legal and rare” line, which stigmatized the choice even as it argued for the right to make it. In another, they might be laughing at their own irritated responses to a particularly irresponsible bit of storytelling.

If abortion is often regarded as a topic so complex and controversial that even the most powerful institutions and ambitious politicians are loath to go near it, Hollywood Does Abortion makes a point of presenting it as digestible and approachable.

Covering half a century’s worth of storytelling about reproductive rights — from a Maude episode that aired shortly before Roe v. Wade to Blonde, which released shortly after its overturn in 2022, and beyond — it lays out in clear and cogent detail how real-world conversations are reflected in our pop culture. Which, in turn, has the power to influence public thinking and even actual legislation around certain issues, à la the Will & Grace effect.

Like how Dirty Dancing taught the generation who came up after Roe what they stood to lose if those rights were repealed, by smuggling a back-alley abortion storyline into an irresistible teen romance. Or, on the flip side, how a particularly nasty episode of Law & Order inspired by George Tiller helped to justify his murder in retrospect, by turning the fictionalized version of him into the specter of every fervent pro-lifer’s nightmares.

And even within its limited run time, the film allows for nuance: The same Dirty Dancing clips that served as a necessary reminder of an uglier past resurface in another segment discussing how the frequent depiction of abortion as physically and emotionally traumatic helped portray it as something evil.

Hollywood Does Abortion’s biggest issue, insofar as it can even be fairly described as one, is simply the overabundance of worthy topics. The filmmakers are admirable in their ambition, touching on everything from the way male characters are depicted in these storylines (often furious at not having been allowed more say) to which types of stories remain underrepresented (basically anything that isn’t about a pretty young white woman getting a medical procedure) to Hollywood’s favorite wishy-washy plot cheats (like Cristina’s ectopic pregnancy on Grey’s Anatomy, the result of ABC refusing to let Shonda Rimes depict her going through with an abortion).

However, the doc’s wide-ranging view also means touching on things is all it has time to do. Though entire essays can and have been written about some of the individual storylines mentioned here (indeed, Slate critic Dana Stevens, who wrote one about Knocked Up’s “shmashmortion” approach, gets to reiterate some of her points here), the vast majority of referenced shows and movies appear only as out-of-context clips, and even the ones subject to more thorough discussion are allowed just a few minutes at most.

But such restraint is more a virtue than a drawback of the movie, which works precisely because it’s so judicious about recognizing what fits into its scope and what doesn’t. It’s plugged in enough to bring up, say, trad wife content on TikTok — a very modern form of pop culture — but smart enough to recognize that it’s another discussion for another day. It shows enough clips of conservative commentators spewing hateful rhetoric or prominent politicians like J.D. Vance demanding “more babies” to provoke justified fury, but leaves the hardcore history lessons for other books or docs to handle.

Very consciously, Hollywood Does Abortion positions itself as part of a larger discussion rather than its entirety. And while it can be devastatingly candid about the terror of the times we live in, it offers itself up as a call to fight rather than a concession of defeat.