#45 — Vera Drake (Mike Leigh, 2004)
It is practically a necessity to begin any discussion or celebration of a Mike Leigh film by detailing his unique methodology. As is well-established, Leigh begins by assembling his actors and assigning them characters. This team then goes through extensive improvisations, under the guidance of Leigh, to develop their roles. Often key plot elements are withheld from the players to better generate genuinely surprised reactions when a revelation occurs. Leigh uses that raw material to shape the dialogue and general progression of the story. This approach is central to the success of Leigh’s best films. It creates added layers of richness for the characters, and, importantly, for the world they move through. There’s an added authenticity to it all, a sense that you’re watching just one part of lives in progress. Even the smallest roles inhabit the frame with the sense that they’re intersecting with the story rather than supporting it. When these characters walk away from the scene, they’re heading towards something of their own, and if you could cross through the screen, you could follow them there.

Vera Drake, described in the simplest way, is about a middle-aged, working class woman who performs illegal abortions in London in 1950. More accurately, it’s about the place and time that Vera lives in, marked by hardscrabble scheming, the dramatic divisions between the classes and what is and isn’t naturally available to them driving many of the decisions. In fact, the reason Vera risks her own freedom to perform abortions is a simple, pragmatic response to the circumstances. There’s not a major moral dilemma for Vera. In her characterization, she helps young girls out, providing a service that is outside the law, but also, as the movie firmly establishes, unavailable to them primarily because they don’t possess the social connections or spare money to procure the procedure through other avenues. Imelda Staunton is fantastic in the title role. Her gradual reaction, Leigh’s camera trained tightly on her face, when the lawmaen finally arrive is justly lauded as her single finest moment in the film, but the scenes in which Vera tends to her clients are also extraordinarily well-realized: thoughtful, delicate, thoroughly lived-in acting. The quiet care and straightforward ease she brings to the character in these scenes is sweetly poignant, conveying the full extent of her empathy, as well as hinting at just how commonplace performing this procedure has become for her.

These are the pieces that make Vera Drake into a resonant drama instead of some didactic provocation. There’s a clear risk in taking on the hottest of hot button issues. No matter how it’s couched in deeply considered examination of socioeconomic circumstances, no matter how distant of a past the actions might reside in, there are those whose ire will reach Everestian heights at the mere rendering of an abortionist as a largely sympathetic protagonist. While I think Leigh’s personal views on the subject, as expressed by the movie, are fairly clear, he doesn’t present the film as an argument, another cannon shot in the culture wars, a preemptive jeremiad against those who will line up to disagree with him. It is, instead, a story about people, and especially about families, those you’re born into and those you build. Vera’s side enterprise helping those women in need is only a part of the film–a vital part to be sure, but only a part. Demonizing the entire film because of it is as shortsighted as firing off written screeds about individual frames of celluloid; it demonstrates a personal unwillingness to grapple with the art of filmmaking in an intellectually honest way.

Like anyone who works as a director, Mike Leigh has his shortcomings as a filmmaker. A dearth of intellectual honesty isn’t one of them. Vera Drake is representative of his commitment to his characters, his stories and his ideas. He sets off on fearless collaborations and sees them through, resolutely and devotedly, to the very end. Everything he does is about scratching for a deeper truth, some telling moment or instinctive response, something that can pull the fiction closer to the alternating sting and joy of reality. He is a scholar of humanity and his films are his textbook. When one of them is as ideally realized as Vera Drake, it seems a great act of generosity that he shares his textbooks with us.

(Posted simultaneously to “Jelly-Town!”)