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Film
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Vera Drake
Four decades after the landmark BBC series The Wednesday Play became the first to seriously tackle the topic of abortion, one of its most successful graduates – Mike Leigh - returns with a refreshingly tempered full-length treatise.
Wednesday, October 27, 2004
By Brett Buckalew
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Fine Line Features
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Actress Imelda Staunton
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One need only look at the recent, televised presidential debates to see how much of a divisive lightning rod the issue of abortion has become. Even before related matters like stem-cell research are brought up, the basic question of whether terminating a still-developing life constitutes a moral wrong is already a hot point of contention. It will certainly be an issue on many voters’ minds next Tuesday, as the views of pro-choice Kerry and pro-life Bush are placed on the scales of public opinion.
It says something about legendary British director Mike Leigh’s new film, Vera Drake, that even though its narrative is focused on the abortion issue, it neither capitalizes on the mass hysteria surrounding the subject, nor preaches its own point-of-view on it. Intriguingly, Leigh’s first credit back in 1964 for the BBC, The Wednesday Play, was responsible the following year for the landmark abortion drama Up the Junction, populated also with working class Londoners.
Vera Drake is not objective, exactly - Leigh is too compassionate a filmmaker not to understand the circumstances that would drive a woman to end her pregnancy - but it’s so subtle in examining the contexts of class and oppression that make abortion an unfortunate necessity that it arrives as a bracing tonic, a reminder that sometimes the most reasonable voice in a debate is one of quiet maturity.
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Fine Line Features
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Sixty-one years young
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Like many stories that lend perspective to the present day, Vera Drake is set in the past, specifically the shaky post-war environment of London in 1950. Having to make ends meet is the Drake family, who occupy one of the lower rungs of the middle class. Patriarch Stan (Phil Davis) is a car mechanic, his wife Vera (Imelda Staunton) cleans the houses of the wealthy, son Sid (Daniel Mays) works in a tailor’s shop, and daughter Ethel (Alex Kelly) tests light bulbs at a factory. While money is not abundant within the family, love and gentleness, thankfully, are, and the caring even extends to Reg (Eddie Marsan), an awkward young man who has his eye on Ethel.
But there is a secret that Vera has kept from the rest of her brood: for many years; she has been performing black-market abortions for women who cannot afford to raise a child. Arriving at every appointment with a sort of detached air of reassurance (‘You know, your hair looks really lovely,’ she complements one patient before beginning the procedure), Vera has incorporated this anonymous service into her life to such a degree that it has become just another part of her routine.
However, Vera’s life is shaken when a procedure goes wrong. Even worse, Vera is recognized during the very same procedure, thereby ensuring the unveiling of her identity to the police. When Vera is arrested and put on trial for what was considered a crime at the time, it tests the strength and resolve of not just herself, but her entire family.
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Fine Line Features
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Co-star Philip Davis
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In every one of his films including High Hopes, Naked and the Oscar-nominated Secrets and Lies, Leigh has utilized a singular filmmaking technique where he and his cast shape the script through an intensive period of rehearsal and improvisation, and then shoot the communally-written screenplay. The benefit of this approach is that it conjures up thrillingly spontaneous, realistically small moments of human comedy and drama. In Vera Drake, there are many such valuable nuggets, from the laughably arrogant customer at Sid’s shop who wants to look like George Raft for a wedding, to the painful spectacle of a rape victim (Sally Hawkins) having to ask an insensitive, oblivious friend about an abortionist over lunch.
What makes Leigh’s observant, generous technique even more essential for a provocative project like Vera Drake is that it becomes the very definition of what it means to be nonjudgmental. As the intensity of the narrative escalates, and Vera’s secret is revealed to the authorities and to her family, the film’s style remains subdued, sympathetic, and remarkably authentic.
If there’s one disadvantage to Leigh’s studious filmmaking however that none of his most ardent fans are willing to cop to, it’s in his frequent misperception of dramatic dead weight as an extreme form of realism. While Vera Drake is not as outrageous an offender in this regard as Leigh’s last period piece, the mystifyingly praised Topsy-Turvy, there are still scenes here and there that drag on as if being deliberate is automatically equivalent to being thoughtful.
Still, the chances Leigh takes in this film pay off much more often than not. Many of his digressions and subplots - such as the tentative courtship between Reg and Ethel - add richness and character to the vividly evoked social mosaic. And the choice to never overtly spell out all of Vera’s motives for performing the abortions ends up being a wise one, especially since Staunton’s heartbreaking performance is such an expressive marvel that it hardly needs extra embellishment.
In fact, it’s Staunton and Davis who have the film’s most emotionally potent scene. When the police force Vera to inform her husband about why she has been detained, Leigh lets his actors play out the scene without dialogue, and Stan’s reaction to his wife’s revelation feels both unexpected and inevitable at once. It’s a moment sure to bring sudden tears to anyone’s eyes, and, like much of Vera Drake, it transcends politics to focus on what makes us fundamentally human.
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