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Vera Drake
Mike Leigh, UK
by Richard Porton
The title of Mike Leigh’s new film explicitly
evokes Hollywood melodramas of the 30s and 40s. Like Mildred Pierce
or Stella Dallas, the eponymous Vera Drake (Imelda Staunton) is
something of a martyr, albeit a considerably more opaque one than
was fashionable during the golden age of “women’s films.”
When I recently suggested to the alternately charming and curmudgeonly
Leigh that Vera Drake resembles a traditional melodrama
“drained” of its usual excess, he concluded that my
formulation was marred by “topsy-turvy” reasoning”—his
narrative couldn’t be drained of an element that wasn’t
present in the first place. On the other hand, he readily agreed
that melodrama itself shouldn’t be summarily dismissed. To
a large extent, the paradox of a melodrama that dares not speak
its name reveals the tangible strengths—and nagging weaknesses—of
Leigh’s latest attempt to fuse quasi-Brechtian detachment
with the more classical concerns of familial trauma. As a director
of bbc films, Leigh benefited from the necessity of an invigoratingly
stripped-down aesthetic. With larger budgets, he has been able to
lavish more time on visual detail and narrative complexity, but
his films have become—at least on occasion—flabby and
marred by bathos. This tendency is most egregious in movies such
as Secrets & Lies (1996) and All or Nothing
(2002), in which the salutary rage and political acuity displayed
by Leigh in Meantime (1984) and Naked (1993) congeals
into something akin to the hollow affirmative bromides that the
latter films deride.
Vera Drake hovers between these polarities—less
satisfying than Leigh’s best work while avoiding the peculiar
mixture of faux-existentialist blather and protracted whining (or
whingeing, as the British would say) that made All or Nothing
such a slog. Like all of Leigh’s films, Vera Drake
is highly schematic. But since schematicism is such an essential
component of Leigh’s aesthetic, it is no more of an insult
to point this out than to mention that Ophüls has a weakness
for tracking shots or that Rohmer is fond of nubile young actresses.
Since Leigh’s films are nothing if not character-driven,
his ultra-schematic propensities work best when his protagonists
are given room to breathe within a tight conceptual framework—one
salient example is Johnny’s crazed eloquence in Naked,
which manages to transcend the claustrophobia of a faux-road movie
that, except for a brief introductory sequence, takes place entirely
within the city of London. The equally programmatic Vera Drake
derives its power from the collision of the fate of one intransigent,
although kindly—even saintly—woman with Leigh’s
characteristic preoccupation with family dynamics. This is accomplished
by placing abortion, a concern usually on the periphery of filmed
melodrama, at the centre of the narrative. Vera, a cleaning woman
with an astonishing streak of generosity, lives within a nurturing
working-class milieu that is nevertheless scarred by the traumas
of post-wwii London (1950, to be precise). Yet her supportive friends
and family never imagine that she furtively performs abortions in
her spare time and is a true saviour for desperate working-class
women who cannot afford to bribe greedy doctors.
Although Leigh’s weaker theatrical features
often partially redeem themselves with intriguing digressions—the
syrupy maunderings of Secrets & Lies are at one point
entertainingly interrupted by the rantings of an angry failed businessmen
who never appears again—Vera Drake’s narrative
tributaries seem more like superfluous filigree. As Leigh himself
admitted, Vera Drake is the cynosure, and the film essentially
revolves around the inexorable consequences of her courageous assistance
to young women “in need.” Vera’s quandary resonates
precisely because of the contradictions it yields; she is one of
the few truly good and selfless heroines in contemporary cinema,
yet her self-sacrificing devotion to her charges—and the unavoidably
ad hoc nature of her abortions—almost result in a woman’s
accidental death.
It’s undeniable that the ambiguous nature
of this secular saint’s good works is determined by historical
circumstances beyond her control—and therein lies the poignancy
of her fate. As early as 1938, a British gynecologist named Aleck
Bourne was famously acquitted of criminal charges when it was verified
that he induced a miscarriage in a young girl who had been cruelly
raped. Because of her class and sex, Vera Drake cannot possibly
establish legal precedents or retain her professional respectability.
Nevertheless, the film eschews didacticism and admirably refuses
to sentimentalize or rationalize Vera’s single, but fateful,
botched abortion. Even when Leigh, opting for a compare-and-contrast
maneuver, switches gears and presents us with a parallel tale of
an upper-middle class young woman named Susan (Sally Hawkins), who
easily obtains an abortion with the help of a psychiatrist’s
referral, the film is not permanently derailed and the almost monomaniacal
concern with Vera’s plight is only temporarily deferred. It
is somewhat regrettable, however, that many of the supporting characters—Vera’s
mechanic husband Stan (Phil Davis), and her loving children Ethel
and Sid, are, for Leigh characters, oddly—and rather blandly—lacking
in ostensible neuroses.
Leigh describes the postwar period in Britain as
an odd amalgam of “innocence and barbarism,” and the
nonchalant savagery of this era is driven home through the character
of Lily (Ruth Sheen), a preternaturally cheerful black marketeer
who arranges appointments for Vera and gladly accepts cash from
clients—something the morally upright Vera would never even
consider. Although Leigh is an almost congenitally earnest director,
the seedy ambience suggested by Lily’s demimonde is vaguely
reminiscent of the much more sordid hucksterism detailed by Fassbinder
in his brd trilogy. While Fassbinder often appears to be using characters
such as Lola and Maria Braun as distancing devices (or even elegant
props) to illuminate a cutthroat period in German history, the historical
minutiae in Vera Drake is always designed to highlight
its protagonist’s idiosyncrasies and moral fibre—as
usual, the Dickensian strain in Leigh ultimately triumphs over any
nascent Brechtian inclinations.
While critics may have brief dalliances with Leigh’s
films and then stray after becoming smitten with other directors,
actors are the true objects of Leigh’s affection, and they
usually respond with genuine, undiluted love. Oddly enough, for
a director whose collaboration with actors usually occupies a place
of pride in critical discussions of his work, Leigh is unusually
reticent when it comes to queries concerning what is rather clunkily
referred to as his “process.” (When I asked Leigh about
the rudiments of this process, and the research conducted by the
actors for their roles in Vera Drake, he remarked that
he was reluctant to talk about the matter and merely concurred when
I came up with the phrase “collaborative alchemy.”)
In any case, Phil Davis, who plays Vera’s husband, claims
that Leigh’s films provide the key to his career, and Imelda
Staunton, who brilliantly portrays Vera without a hint of condescension,
is equally effusive in a her praise of the director—who often
comes off as cranky in his meetings with the press. The remarkable
collaboration between Leigh and Staunton results in the audacious
decision to focus on Staunton’s face, which combines terror
and incomprehension, during the film’s pivotal courtroom scene.
Whatever reservations one might have concerning the intrinsic capacity
of sustained close-ups to manipulate the viewer within a framework
that, whether Leigh wants to admit it or not, is unabashedly melodramatic,
the absolute trust between actor and director conveyed by this denouement
is genuinely moving.
Considered in its entirety, Leigh’s career
resembles a fugue in which certain themes recur, are recycled, or
become transmogrified. Just as a family gathering lays the groundwork
for a catalytic eruption of outrage or sentiment in many Leigh films
(Meantime, Life Is Sweet [1990], Grown-Ups
[1980], and Secrets & Lies are the most prominent examples),
an initially placid engagement party sets the scene for Vera’s
arrest in his latest chamber drama. In addition, Vera Drake
might be viewed as a more forceful (or to use that repellent piece
of jargon “proactive”) version of Mrs. Thornley, the
cleaning woman at the center of Hard Labour (1973) who
silently endures her dictatorial husband’s taunts and stoically
remarks that suffering is required to bring children into this world.
Given the repressive climate of Britain in the 50s, Vera Drake’s
modest insistence that women’s suffering can be slightly reduced
is almost utopian. In certain respects, the less ambitious Hard
Labour is a more rigorous film that makes fewer concessions
to popular tastes. Yet, given that Leigh, quite understandably,
prefers his relatively lavish production values to the austere style
of BBC telefilms—and no doubt itches to achieve another commercial
breakthrough on the order of Secrets & Lies—Vera
Drake is suffused with integrity, even if it falls short of
being a masterpiece.
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