***1/2 (out of ****)
Starring Imelda Staunton, Richard Graham, Eddie Marsan, Anna Keaveney, Daniel Mays, Philip Davis, Lesley Manville, Allan Corduner, Peter Wight, and Jim Broadbent
Directed & written by Mike Leigh
2004
125 min R
As a document of working class London life in the 1950s, “Vera Drake” is as interesting and revealing as any of director-writer Mike Leigh’s (“All or Nothing,” “Topsy-Turvy”) other films about how the other half lives. The husband works in a garage, the wife cleans the houses of the wealthy, the son is a tailor, and the daughter packages lightbulbs at a local factory. After hours, the men talk slow about the war while the women make sure everyone has enough tea. On the parlor sofa, the daughter carries on a monosyllabic romance with a local veteran while dad “chaperones” them, asleep in his easy chair. The homes, factories, flats, and faded, war-sullied clothes have all been painstakingly recreated, and the atmosphere feels genuine. The central figure is Vera (Imelda Staunton), who in addition to looking after her own family and working as a house cleaner, looks after several local invalids who may or may not be related to her. And she does all this cheerfully and without complaint.
It’s when we find out what Vera does in her free time, when she’s not being saintly, that the film takes on larger dimensions: she performs abortions. Out of her worn sack comes a bar of soap, a hand pump, and a cheese grater, and she tells her nervous-trembling patients to boil some water. The different moral standards exercised by the rich and the poor is highlighted as a rich girl goes through the procedure that Vera supplies, only in place of motherly Vera she has the emotionally and clinically sterile world of the professional psychiatric clinic. It’s a bit chilling how little Vera’s demeanor changes from scrubbing floors to inducing miscarriages; she stops singing to herself, but she stays as inanely optimistic and perky as before, because her clients feel safer with an anonymous aunt, not the clean professional that the rich girl gets. In both cases, the act is illegal, but the rich girl can simply pay her way past the law. Such is life: the wealthy send the poor to the electric chair, prison, and the battlefield, while they live in comfort and get slaps on the wrist when they’re caught with cocaine.
Many have brought to “Vera Drake” their own views on abortion and see Vera as a martyr. The sympathetic police officer (Peter Wight) who confronts Vera is kind, quiet, and firm: some critics have seen this to mean that he shares their disdain for anti-abortion laws, while others see him as simply being a good cop, who can believe in a law but still empathize with those who break it. If Leigh sees Vera as a martyr, he doesn’t let on very much, and the movie is better for it. There’s little indication whether or not the saintliness of Vera’s other activities is intended to condone her quackery or throw it in sharper relief. For those who don’t take Vera’s view, the pro-life camp is given eloquent voice when her son discovers what she’s been up to.
Still, Leigh’s stance almost seems beside the point. He seems much more interested in how the lower classes have always been burdened with situational ethics, lacking the luxury of strict right-and-wrong. In many ways, what Vera does is not so different from the countless films about how the economically depressed turn to drugs or liquor store robberies. “Vera Drake” is not a million miles away from “Hotel Rwanda” and “Collateral” in saying that, as much as salvation for the underclasses should come from higher up, it’s not going to, and they should look to themselves.
In Imelda Staunton’s performance, it can be said that there’s another movie behind the movie. She is so chipper, so selfless, and even a little vapid, accepting no payment for her services. And there’s something unnerving, vaguely Jean Reno-in-“The Professional” about how Vera blindly accepts assignment after assignment from an old friend of hers. (Incidentally, she couldn’t start a word with an H to save her life.) As the authorities finally corner her, she can give only tell them again and again that she “‘elps out girruls in trouble.” Teary-eyed, she can provide no other motivation and can’t even be certain how long she’s been doing it. The briefest of clues is the passing mention of her own illegitimacy and her infirm mother’s refusal to reveal the identity of her father. Instead of giving us Vera’s history—the movie behind the movie—Leigh uses the sudden revelation of her secret life in much the same way he used the explosion of bitterness between husband and wife in “All or Nothing:” the bland, smiling surface of a marriage seems inevitably to give way.
Yet, as much as I admire “Vera Drake,” if we take a few steps back and look at it in its broad strokes, there’s almost a kitschy hollowness to it. The rich are bad, the poor are good, and Vera is the best of all. The working of the abortion theme is almost juvenile: because Vera is so saintly in all other respects, then her after hours activity MUST be equally saintly. The salt of the earth have rarely been so sugary; I thought I would shoot myself if I had to hear the phrase “put the kettle on” one more time. Like “Million Dollar Baby,” released the same year, this is a movie that is in the details, and may very well come apart in outline. But, as always, I deeply admire Leigh’s ability to create entire families, palpable settings, and maneuver us up and down the social strata so effortlessly.
Finished Thursday, February 24th, 2005
Copyright © 2005 Friday & Saturday Night
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