Vera Drake (Imelda Staunton) rarely, if ever, thinks about herself. This 50-something mother of two grown kids spends most of her waking hours as a housekeeper. And during her off hours she’s either tending to the needs of those children (who still live with her) and car-mechanic husband (Phil Davis) or dropping by the apartments of neighbors in need to see if there’s anything she could do to make their lives easier.
Vera has also, in secrecy, been working as a house-call abortionist for about 20 years, maybe longer — long enough that when asked for exact dates or the job’s impetus later in the film, everything’s a blur. She’s never taken payments for her work. (Though the hardened woman who helps find clients, played by Ruth Sheen, covertly takes a cut up front.) In Vera’s mind, this act of public service just needs doing. Why take money for it? It’s hardly different to her eye from heating up noodle soup for a sick loved one.
Vera, small and cheerful, is such a genuinely kind and generous person that it may take you aback at first. She might seem like a caricature of angelicness if she weren’t the lead character in a movie made by Mike Leigh, a filmmaker who’s always rejected oversimple characterization as if it were diseased, and if she weren’t played by Staunton, an actress who, in an astounding performance, convinces us Vera’s chronic selflessness needn’t be scrutinized or questioned because it is indeed just innate.
The arc of Vera Drake (2004) engenders some thriller-like tension but never rises into the sensationalism it easily could. Midway through the movie, one of Vera’s clients has a bad reaction to her normally foolproof methods, and she’s arrested. (The movie is set in a still-reeling-from-the-war 1950, 17 years before abortion’s legalization in London, where the film takes place.) Even with its emotionally commanding interrogation and courtroom scenes — usually venues for exposition dumps in so-called “message movies” with hot-button conceits like Vera Drake’s — Leigh avoids unhandy pedagogy or an explicitly stated political bent. His film functions as a tactful and clear-headed, but also subtle, look at the reproductive mores of the 1950s. It doesn’t look to preach. It wants us to experience the climate. (Much of that is illustrated by a haunting subplot involving a young woman, played heartbreakingly by Sally Hawkins, trying desperately to get an abortion after her boyfriend rapes her.)
The film is also intent on capturing the Drakes’ household dynamics and how they’re shaken up by their matriarch’s long-held secret. Leigh’s mechanism to achieve his amazing, trademark naturalism — have his actors congregate ahead of production and, across several weeks, improvise together so that when shooting begins their relationships feel lived-in — works wonderfully here. The often-acclaimed scene where the police first come to the cramped Drake apartment to question Vera especially makes you feel like you’re in that small, sweaty space, dumbfounded by how what was once a typically merry family dinner has become something unbearably stressful. You can feel this family’s closeness in the air. Vera Drake becomes additionally fascinating as it rides the unease that thickens as certain members viscerally uncomfortable with abortion grapple with the unexpected truth. Does it really cancel out Vera’s tenderheartedness the way they initially think it does?
The image that stays with me most from Vera Drake is Staunton’s crying face, in close-up, as she’s questioned by the police midfilm. Staunton makes Vera’s anguish so real that it can take you over. Her performance has a meticulousness that conveys, without saying so, that the tears aren’t even necessarily for herself. They’re for the loved ones who may be next impacted by association, the young women she may not be able to help. Vera Drake is a work of deep empathy whose emotional astuteness does justice to a subject worthy of serious discussion and sensitivity.
Peterson Reviews 