Vera Drake



by Shari L. Rosenblum

The quiet misery of the working class in post-war London -- dreary, gray, cold and cramped -- provides the backdrop both real and metaphorical for Mike Leigh's Vera Drake, the story of a soft-spoken, nondescript, cheery-eyed mum and abortionist. The word strikes steely -- ugly and profane -- and even unspoken, whispered over and around the text, seems incongruous with the portrait he paints of the uncomplaining servant and caretaker: Vera Drake (Imelda Staunton), who lives with and cares for her husband (Phil Davis) and two grown children, is the kind of woman who hums to herself while she cleans other people's houses, boils a pot of tea to mend whatever ails anyone, and ends all her sentences, meaningfully, with the word “dear.”

When the film opens, the year is 1950. Abortion will not be legal in England for another 17 years, but the question of legality is never explicitly raised by Vera, or those she cares for. The secret is in the process: she tells no one what she does, working in the shadows -- in minutes her patients can steal from their days, in privacy they can barely afford or guarantee. Her tools are primitive -- a bar of lye, disinfectant, a pump and syringe, and the boiled water always associated with childbirth -- but she brings the promise of a cure. To make it all okay.

Abortion is not prettified; but nor is it the bloodied hanger horror tale to which politicized audiences have become immune. Here, the procedure is peaceful -- almost as if an inversion of the act of sex and procreation. A reversal. Not violent, but discomfiting. The women twinge uneasily when the syringe is inserted, tremble warily as they wait to feel filled up, and then wait yet more to see if they will bleed again. Like the women's sexuality, this undoing is uncommented upon -- except in the parenthesis where one character describes Vera simply by the size of her hands. (The stereotypes of women's sexuality are touched upon, around the edges - an unmarriageable daughter made marriageable, a wife who trades procreation for presents, the victim of a date rape -- but they create balance to the story's beat rather than a rhythm of their own).

Leigh, who is always political, manages in this very personal film to subsume political simplicity in a larger humanism -- to rescue the volatile subject of abortion from the rhetoric, to return the shadings to the political blacks and whites -- to remember the reality. The women who call on Vera are not of a single sort; they are young, and not so young, unwed and wed, virgins and vixens, black and white. They approach the promise Vera brings with varying degrees of misgiving and fear. The only thing they have in common is their need not to be with child. Vera does not judge them, and in this lies her strength. And the film's. (A subplot in which a well-heeled girl finds her own way through the process makes the contrast concrete).

The power of Vera Drake is born of its characters -- bit players as well as major roles -- and the acting is strong all around. Staunton's acting in particular is subtle, but intense. Her face is small and without angles -- plump and doughy, without the hint of a threat. And when the law comes crashing down on Vera, as it has to in such a tale, the face simply melts. She becomes unable to speak -- whispering her secret to her husband of 27 years in a scene stunningly directed: the face of man and wife come together as if to kiss, the image of the police officer behind and between them. Leigh's hand has never been more deft.

The matter is turned over to the courts, the procedures into code-speak, and the determinations out of sync with the acts in question. The film closes without closure, as is only fitting for the subject. One inevitably leaves the theater not with a sense of anger, but in overwhelming sadness.

©2004 Shari L. Rosenblum
CineScene