Vera Drake
You can almost smell the damp wool and feel the worn china teacups of an exhausted 1950s London in Mike Leigh's stunning and compassionate period drama Vera Drake. In fact, it's not too much of a leap to say you can take the pulse of postwar Britain, guided by old proprieties but modernized by harsh necessity, in Imelda Staunton's blazing performance in the title role. Staunton's Drake is a wifey, a mum, one of the stalwarts of the Commonwealth no blitz could defeat. Patient and steady with her husband (the wonderful Phil Davis), clucking like a round hen after her grown children, and cheerful even as she briskly cleans the homes of the more prosperous to make ends meet, she's a sensible pillar of the neighborhood. And the magnificently sturdy Staunton, who has staked her ground for years in smaller colorful parts (e.g., the nurse in Shakespeare in Love), claims the role with gestures as precise as the definitive way she clutches a handbag or climbs the flight of stairs to her front door; hers is a great prizeworthy performance as a practical soul not nearly as mousy as her wardrobe suggests.
Drake does something else, too, a bit of freelance she keeps from her family: She helps women with unwanted pregnancies. Which is to say, Vera Drake is an abortionist, just as upbeat and matter-of-fact while performing illegal procedures with her secret instruments — she hums, always — as she is in the kitchen at suppertime. And in dramatizing the clash of moral and legal right and wrong, with patience and soulful fair-mindedness for all sides of the crisis (there's a trial at the climax), Leigh goes to someplace new and deeper in his lifelong cinematic interest in class bonds and conflicts.
As with Topsy-Turvy, Leigh's glorious 1999 release, set a century ago, the filmmaker finds artistic liberation in the strictures of reproducing a past era. Invigorated in Vera Drake by passionate attention to 50-year-old atmospheric truth, the estimable British specialist in ensemble realism, famous for Secrets & Lies and Life Is Sweet, shows once again how modernity coexists with the persistence of tea cozies.
