Mike Leigh's Vera Drake (2004)

[Chris Knipp]

Subtle miniatures that deliver a wallop

Since he moved from TV to film in the late Eighties Mike Leigh hasn’t made a single movie that wasn’t worth seeing, and Vera Drake, a period piece about a housecleaner who goes to jail in 1950 for “helping girls out when they’re in trouble,” continues his run of high quality work. In a sense Vera Drake is "Masterpiece Theater" for the liberal left. It’s full of English reserve and costume-conscious production values and features a uniformly excellent, selfless cast, but like Leigh’s films with contemporary settings (and unlike his 1999 Gilbert and Sullivan drama Topsy Turvy) it focuses primarily on moral issues and the dilemmas of the urban poor. The result is a quiet but thought-provoking triumph where all the elements -- acting, setting, editing -- are immaculate and the tidy resulting package delivers a surprisingly powerful emotional wallop along with its social message and its history lesson.

As we observe Vera (Imelda Staunton, superb in her role) bustling about every day in her neighborhood to cheer up invalids and her aged mother after polishing brass and floors for city toffs, we realize she’s bent on “helping” others at every level. She calls everyone "dear," even the cops who interrogate her at the end. There’s something both saintly and blind about her relentless kindness. Arguably she has a childish mind that’s incapable of seeing the shallowness of her do-gooding -- or the evil of her childhood friend Lily (Ruth Sheen) who sets up her “helping” jobs for her own gain. That her “service” for women with unwanted pregnancies is done for free is selfless on Vera's part, but also stupid: how can she not know after years of this that Lily's pocketing the cash?


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[hengcs]

Well, I have just watched the movie.
;)

What I like?
-- You really have to credit Imelda Staunton for her performance.
-- The not simply "black and white" but rather "gray" issues.
-- It is not preachy, and the audience have to decide for themselves ...

What some people may not like ...
-- Like most art films, the pacing is not very fast.
-- Some people might have very strong opinions about the issue of abortion, so they may feel uneasy at times.

[Chris Knipp]

No one could quarrel with anything you say. The "gray" issues aspect is especially important. I think this is what's most interesting about the movie--that (1) Vera doesn't know that she's doing wrong, really--she knows in a way, but she's not fully conscious of it, (2) she's a genuinely well-meanng person, who doesn't even take money for it, and (3) factually the law put women with unwanted pregnancies in a terrible position, so Vera's work was in a sense justified. Of course that's a matter of opinion, which brings us to your point that since abortion is controversial people may be disturbed by watching this. I thought too little of that. I wonder if people who're anti-abortion, if they were even willing to see the movie, might in fact be troubled by Vera's innocence and her suffering when caught.

I won't quarrel with your saying the pacing is slow, but I don't see it. Rather, to me it seems to chug right along. To be sure, not a high speed actioner. The New Yorker thumbnail review I just noticed starts out by saying "In its limited way, perfect." I think maybe it's the smallness of the canvas and the mildness of the style, which is all very English in an old fashioned way -- rather than slow motion -- that you may be noticing. And this is a limitiation --- but I don't think you'd find such "art films" as Almodovar's Talk to Her slow paced, or limited in scope either.