NYFF COVERAGE – Contemporary British cinema is a strangely mixed bag these days. The imports we in the United States are likely to receive are either drawing room dramas, Hugh Grant comedies, or the latest James Bond film. These days, little is heard of the great tradition of British realism on this side of the Atlantic; the films of Tony Richardson and Alan Clarke drift into obscurity, and new films by Ken Loach go largely unnoticed.
One of the few filmmakers to have bridged these two trends in British filmmaking is Mike Leigh. First with films like Secrets and Lies and Topsy-Turvy, and now with his new film, Vera Drake, Leigh has provided a kind of agitprop for the PBS and BBC crowds, realistic documents of middle and lower class life with that meticulous attention to character and acting so particular to British film, television, and theater.
But this wider international appeal seems not to have diminished Leigh’s commitment to political, social, and especially familial realities. Vera Drake is his second period film, set in London in the wake of the Second World War. But unlike many a bucolic, golden-hued episode of Miss Marple, Vera Drake takes on the issue of abortion before its legalization in the hazy, drab green working class areas of North London. Vera is a busy wife, mum, and housecleaner who provides tea and sympathy to everyone she knows. Her diligence and generosity are boundless, even in her secret life of “helping girls in trouble.” As in Secrets and Lies, the exposure of this secret life provides the film’s point of crisis, in which each of the characters reacts to the situation in accordance with their experience, their class (or class pretensions), their morality, or their fears.
Many of the protagonists in Mike Leigh’s films conform to certain vaguely recognizable types, but the director almost invariably elicits rich characterizations from his performers. Here, it is Imelda Staunton’s transformative (and award-winning) performance as the title character that draws the film away from being merely a “message picture” and makes it an expert and thoroughly engrossing character drama. Staunton makes the role of Vera – a golden-hearted old dear with a seemingly insatiable hunger for tea and biscuits – one of great emotional complexity, eschewing any facile moral response to the social and sexual issues at the heart of the film.
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Fine Line Features 35mm print
06 Oct 2004 3:20 PM | Submit Comment
