Vera Drake

Directed by Mike Leigh

Fine Line Features

In a life crowded by the tedium of poverty, how can one woman find the space for doing good?

Vera Drake seeks to answer that question while pondering the subjective nature of “good” and exploring whether it’s worth attempting. An intimate film about the lives of a small cast of characters, this simple masterpiece by director Mike Leigh manages to be at once philosophically expansive and physically claustrophobic. Personalities too large for their surroundings compound the effect of poverty on spaciousness—there is merely too little room to accommodate everyone, their needs for privacy and their individual desires. Leigh creates an economy of space, framing the lives of a family at a scale too close for comfort.

Imelda Staunton gives a tight performance as the title character, a mid-century London mother who tests light bulbs in a factory and keeps house for the wealthy to provide for her children and aged mother. Somehow, she still finds the time to invite neighbors over to her apartment for tea and a matchmaking session. In her “spare” time, she performs simple abortions to “help out young girls,” as she conceives of it, in a British cultural climate in which doing so is almost unthinkably wrong.

The feeling of crowding derives not just from an awareness of tight quarters—a shot of Vera’s daughter Ethel (Alex Kelly) barely folding herself into her closet of a bedroom or a glimpse of the apartment building’s courtyard, where rusty bikes huddle, fighting for space under a thin metal roof—or from the contrast between this and the spaciousness of the homes Vera cleans. An abiding atmosphere of tension contributes equally. Relations with Vera’s in-laws are clearly strained, and the audience’s knowledge that Vera’s friend Lily (Ruth Sheen) is using her makes the subtle drama bubble until the dramatic push toward an inevitable climax causes it to boil over.

The viewer is meant to empathize viscerally with Vera against the mores and legal code of her time. Leigh expects his audience to seethe that the only option most women had then in the case of undesired pregnancy was to bring someone like Vera into their homes—to let her inflate their wombs with a solution of hot water and soap, shockingly the same procedure recommended today by the National Abortion & Reproductive Rights Action League.

The pendulous arm of justice, too, presses down on Vera Drake. By the end of the film, it is not just women as a social category who must live without freedom but Vera herself, forced to exchange liberty for captivity and the ultimate sort of crowding—that of a prison.

Despite this dark and weighty air, however, moments of great openness and flexible acceptance wriggle through. Vera’s husband (Richard Graham) shines in his unquestioning support of his wife, and her son (Daniel Mays) comes around at his urging, learning to separate his family from the herd and not to condemn his mother like the masses.

Staunton received the award for best actress at the Venice International Film Festival this year, a fitting prize for her exemplary work, but she is not alone in this accomplished ensemble. The acting throughout is of extraordinary quality: a film that could have been all about a message becomes instead a portrait of a time, a place and a family. That in itself is a triumph, and something that makes Vera Drake stand out from the crowd.

—Alexandra B. Moss

Ray

Directed by Taylor Hackford

Universal Pictures