October 21-27, 2004

movies

Ends and Means

VERA, SHE'S HERE TO HELP: Imelda Staunton as Vera Drake's maternal abortionist.

Vera Drake may be Mike Leigh's most accomplished movie, if not his most honest.

by Sam Adams

The most overtly political film of Mike Leigh's career, Vera Drake is also one of his most subtle and satisfying (if not, altogether, his most honest). In a time when the tenor of political discussion is invariably strident, the film serves as a welcome reminder that strong convictions need not always be expressed at maximum volume.

Leigh's career-high All or Nothing was uniformly written off as "bleak," a description that has more to do with reviewers' discomfort with working-class life than any particular dourness on Leigh's part. No doubt the same chorus will rise for Vera Drake, given its setting in grimy, post-WWII London and especially its central subject. Despite the occasional grimness of her surroundings, though, the movie's protagonist is uniformly chipper. Vera (Imelda Staunton) is a stooped but implacable matriarch who fights grief with cups of tea and beef stew, sort of a cross between Mrs. Miniver and Mrs. Pepperpot. By day, she travels from house to house, raising spirits as she cleans floors. By night, she looks after her brood: husband Stan (Phil Davis), children Sid (Daniel Mays) and Ethel (Alex Kelly), even Reg (Eddie Marsan), a lonely neighborhood man she meets in a stairwell. The spirit of postwar reconstruction, Vera does her utmost to help others and never utters a complaint.

We're well into Vera Drake before we discover Vera has another profession: administering soap and water abortions to women in need. "Profession," though, isn't the right word; Vera takes no payment, though she accepts a small discount from the black marketeer (Ruth Sheen) who arranges her visits. She's simply helping out, as she would a housewife with a dusty mantlepiece. As she tells one skittish woman, removing a rubber syringe from her towel-wrapped kit, "I'm here to help, aren't I?"

It's 1950, and abortions are still very much illegal, although as an ironic counterpart to Vera's missions of mercy, Leigh interweaves the story of Susan (Sally Hawkins), a wealthy young woman who manages to obtain a legal abortion by feigning mental illness. In fact, her distress is very much real; she's been raped, and when she tells the psychiatrist what she's supposed to say -- that she might kill herself if forced to give birth -- it's no longer clear that she's just saying what she's supposed to say. But he gives her a knowing wink all the same; she's played the game perfectly.

Vera, alas, is not so nimble. Self-effacing Vera plies her trade anonymously, but when the mother of one of her clients recognizes her, you know immediately what comes next. Sure enough, the girl falls ill, the police get involved, and poor Vera is clapped in irons, pulled away from a celebration for her daughter's engagement. The situation reeks of melodrama, but the delicacy with which Staunton handles the slow-dawning realization that Vera's life has ended in an instant prevents bathos from fouling the air. Up until now, Staunton has been the linchpin of an ensemble piece, as Leigh endeavors to show the situations she's stepping into and those she leaves behind. But after the arrest, she's onscreen almost constantly, often in mute, strained close-up. From a social-realist patchwork, Leigh shifts to The Passion of Vera Drake, complete with bursts of angelic music.

It's at this point that Vera Drake begins to feel slightly fishy. It's not enough for Leigh to make Vera the victim of an uncaring society; she has to be an innocent through and through. When the police, who handle her case with as much compassion as the law allows, ask her to admit she's been performing abortions, she responds, "That's not what I do. That's what you call it. They need help." There's a potency to the linguistic battle, which might be Leigh's attempt to remove abortion from the fraught political battles of the present day and return the focus to the women whose lives are affected. But Vera's wide-eyed incomprehension begins to seem more like a form of congenital thick-headedness than any kind of purity, and the insistence on the fact that Vera never took money for her deeds is a curious one, made only more so by the movie's dedication to Leigh's parents, "a doctor and a midwife." Surely Leigh doesn't believe that accepting money for one's deeds makes those deeds inherently suspect, or that there's something wrong with "helping people out" and simultaneously earning a living. And are we supposed to take seriously Vera's statement that the girl who's taken ill after Vera's soapy douche is the first to do so in some 20 years of homespun termination? How on earth could she know?

In some respects, Vera Drake is Leigh's most accomplished, even modern film. Visuals aren't always Leigh's strong suit, but cinematographer Dick Pope and production designer Eve Stewart have crafted an environment that's equal parts Dickens and Vermeer, a London of dark shadows and pools of light, where the dust of the Blitz still hangs in the air, and Jim Clark's editing is brisk, almost edgy. But it can't erase the tinge of old-fashioned breast-beating under the movie's surface.

Vera Drake

Written and directed by Mike Leigh A Fine Line release Opens Friday at Ritz Five

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