‘Vera’ just wants you to think
Times were way different in 1950. Imagine what it would be like to buy a record player for $12.95, a car for $1,300, a house for $14,500.
And, oh, there was this: Back then, you weren’t likely to see crowds parading outside hospitals chanting mantras about the “sanctity of life.” The question just wouldn’t have come up.
By overall societal standards, one related issue – abortion – was a particularly unthinkable alternative to problem pregnancies. For those women who were preyed on by their drunken louts of husbands, rich-boy dates or other types of rapists … well, sorry.
Still, the procedure – although a crime – happened more often than you might think. And if you could afford it, and had a certain social standing, you could pay to make the problem just go away.
If you were poor, though, it was another story altogether.
And in London, at least, that’s when you turned to someone such as Vera Drake, the central character in Mike Leigh’s latest issue film, fittingly titled “Vera Drake,” which is available this week for home viewing.
British director Leigh has, over the course of his three-decades- plus career, made a habit of taking matter-of-fact looks at the issues involving people, whether those issues be families trying to cope with differing definitions of happiness (the ironically titled “Life Is Sweet,” 1990), manic-depressives flirting every moment with self-destruction (1993’s “Naked”) or the notion that trust, once violated, can be hard to repair (1996’s “Secrets and Lies”).
“I make films which deal with the way we live our lives,” Leigh said in an interview included on the official “Vera Drake” Web site ( www.veradrake.com).
In his new film, Leigh introduces us to the solidly working-class Vera (the Oscar-nominated Imelda Staunton), mother of two, wife of a mechanic and so ordinary a person that even the Monty Python comedy troupe wouldn’t stoop to satirize her.
But what she does on the side is, as she says, “help young girls out,” which, of course, is a euphemism for giving them abortions. Trouble arises when one of the girls almost dies, and the police come to arrest the woman who put the girl in such danger.
Leigh, who developed his screenplay as he does all his films – by workshopping the general concept and then shooting the results – hasn’t made the story into a political diatribe. He does what many would think impossible: He attempts to show both sides of what is one of the hottest issues faced by a resolutely split America of 2005.
While Vera carries on with no other motive than to help, she is referred to her clients by a woman – her longtime “friend” Lily (Ruth Sheen) – who not only charges the desperate women for the service but fails to pass on any of the profits to Vera. Lily doesn’t even tell Vera that money is involved.
And though her family stands by her, Vera’s son, Sid (Daniel Mays), does so – at least initially – with reluctance. He virtually disowns her in the first few days after the arrest, accusing her of “killing babies.”
It’s impossible, of course, not to think of “Vera Drake” without considering the question of abortion. But the truth is, while “Vera Drake” is indeed an issue film, the ultimate issue may be more of class than sex or the “sanctity of life.”
And if the white-coated doctors who so clinically clean up unintended pregnancies sit at one end of the spectrum, it’s the frumpily friendly Vera Drakes who occupy the other – and who, so easily, end up being branded as criminals.
In any event, Leigh says he is less interested in taking one side or the other than in presenting the issue in a more balanced manner, irrespective of notions assessing blame.
“(I)t’s not a film that sets out, as far as I’m concerned, to throw at you simplistic black-and-white propagandist notions,” Leigh said. “I invite you, in watching ‘Vera Drake,’ to consider, carefully, some complex and not very easy moral dilemmas.”
Wow. A movie that doesn’t want you to think anything in particular but actually to think, period.
Isn’t that a novel notion.