Filmview > Review

Vera Drake

Directed by Mike Leigh

Starring: Imelda Staunton, Phil Davis, Eddie Marsan, Peter Wight, Sally Hawkins, Daniel Mays, Alex Kelly

Fine Line Features, 2004, 125 mins

Vera Drake is Mike Leigh's eighth feature film, in addition to his many TV dramas, and with it he comes across with complete assurance, an old master, the Rembrandt of British working class life.  His improvisational method - getting the actors to supply ideas and dialogue during rehearsals - has never worked better than in this precision period piece, set in 1950, long enough ago to feel like a completely different world to today's, but near enough to be just on the edge of memory for the older protagonists, and certainly within the worlds of every players' parents or grandparents. 

The period detail is captivatingly exact and carefully nuanced, without ever seeming meretricious.  The male haircuts, stabilised by brycream, the uniform drabness of decor and dress, the unworldly outlook and quaint morality of the pre-permissive era are perfectly caught.  Early on there's a scene where a group of men avidly discuss their experiences in World War II, then over for just five years and still casting long shadows over the present.  It's so believable, so naturalistic, yet oddly unlike the kitchen sink films actually made in the 50's.  Rather it's like looking at the 50's through a powerful time-travelling telescope. 

In this way we are quietly immersed in the lives of the Drake family, father Stan (Phil Davis), mother Vera (Imelda Staunton), and adult children Ethel and Sid.  Stan has a garage business with his brother Frank, and Vera works as a cleaner for posh households.  She's a kindly soul, helping out an incapable old man and inviting the shy Reg (Eddie Marsan) around for his tea.  Quite casually we discover Vera's sideline - performing charitable backstreet abortions for girls who've found themselves 'in trouble'.  Vera's approach to abortion is very low key, to the point where she makes it seem almost inconsequential.  'Take your knickers off, love,' she intones reassuringly to her distressed charges, and then gets to work with rubber syringe, hot water and grated carbolic soap.  It all seems too simple, and indeed it proves to be, as presently one of Vera's girls nearly dies, and Vera comes to the attention of the medical profession, and then the law.

One might question Vera's unconditional belief in the efficacy of abortion, and the fact that her backstreet methods haven't previously led to complications in twenty years of practice; but this has to be taken as a given, since the real story is not so much about abortion as about the personal shame and obloquy of being criminalized in a society which hasn't yet woken up to the concerns of modern life, and being judged harshly - not only by the system but also by members of one's own family. 

In conveying all this Imelda Staunton gives her most achieved performance, becoming that woman in all her homely kindnesses and natural warmth, and then shattering that personality before our very eyes with some terrific physical acting.  The look on her face when the police come to the door could have been painted by Rembrandt, and afterwards she portrays the slow agony of breaking spirit inside hunched body, her quiet meek voice barely able to assemble a defence.  The detail of the performance keeps us riveted, and Vera's final retreat into her shell, surrounded by her family's mixed reactions is, in its own way, all too dramatic.

The rest of the cast are excellent too, with Phil Davis' Stan seeming suitably flummoxed by the whole business, and the love match between Ethel and Reg lending a touch of typical Leigh pathos to offset the gloom.  Also very effective is Leigh regular Peter Wight as the taciturn police inspector who methodically does his duty in arresting Vera; and Sally Hawkins as Susan, a middle-class girl, also in trouble, who, befitting her station, receives a hundred guinea abortion in a private clinic.  This aptly comments on the hypocrisy of a system that will drag Vera through the courts but won't touch the well-appointed doctors and psychiatrists who also ply her trade.