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| Set in 1950s England. Vera Drake leads something of a double-life. She is a selfless mother, who cares for her family and her sick neighbour. She also secretly visits pregnant women to induce miscarriages. When the authorities uncover her hidden life, Vera's world comes crushing down... Click here for our interview with Mike Leigh.
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The Academy may have overlooked this challenging, heart-breaking movie, failing to reward it with any of the Oscars it so clearly deserved, but that didn't stop the rest of the world from showering it with prizes. From BAFTA and the Venice Film Festival to the London and New York Critics' Circles, Vera Drake has been labeled a classic, as challenging as it rewarding, a film that, once seen, you will never forget.
Praise too has been heaped upon Mike Leigh, a director of uncommon insight and sensitivity now regarded as one of the greatest movie craftsmen of his generation. Imelda Staunton has enjoyed a pretty wild ride herself, a character actor on the verge of her fiftieth birthday, once familiar but hardly famous, now considered an international star. With good cause, we believe.
"Imelda just seemed very right to do this job," says Leigh. "With these films that I make, I collaborate with each actor to create a character. Obviously, this is no exception. That's how I make films. There's no formal script in the conventional sense, but there never is." Staunton appears to have enjoyed the process. "The first thing Mike said to me was, ‘I'm interested in making a period drama about a backdoor abortionist. Can you handle it? It's not going to be sensational or melodramatic'. That got my attention right away.
By the time we finally started filming it, after months of research and improvisation," she adds, "I still didn't know how the film was going to end or anything. So it was a voyage of discovery, to say the least, as Mike doesn't tell you what the process is or how it's going to work. You just go in every day and see what happens. I wasn't worried though. Mike's got a bit of a track record so I didn't think I was taking too much of a gamble."
Staunton delivers the performance of a lifetime as abortionist Vera Drake, a decent, vulnerable, working class woman living in Fifties Britain who secretly terminates unwanted pregnancies. Performing these low-tech but effective procedures free of charge, she gets her referrals from Lily (Ruth Sheen), an acid-tongued associate who is secretly paid for Vera's services by the poor and pregnant. At the time abortion was still illegal in England, and when the authorities finally wise up to Vera's unsanctioned mercy missions, the results are tragic indeed. Not just for our title character, but also for her entire family (husband Phil Davis and children Alex Kelly and Daniel Mays). "The surprising piece of information that I learned through my research," says Staunton, "was that 85% of the abortionists who were in prison in the Forties and Fifties were mothers and grandmothers. They were not what I imagined. You know: single women, no kids, evil, living in a basement."
"It's not for me to explain the film or the character," adds Leigh. "What is absolutely certain is that she does not perceive what she does as being in any way wrong. We know that there have always been women in all societies everywhere who have known how to deal with the problem. How I feel about it, personally, is of course ambivalent - it's not a black-and-white issue. It seemed non-negotiable that I had to do what I suppose I always try to do, which is make a film that expresses how I feel about it. On the one hand, the number of unwanted babies born into this chaotic world is unacceptable. On the other, we know that a termination is destroying life. There is a moral dilemma, but it's not a didactic film. It's much more a matter of passionate conviction than cerebral pondering."
Though not always easy to watch, Vera Drake is never less than compelling, a raw and powerful story told with tremendous honesty by Leigh. A stunning British film, it's probably his best work to date. For Staunton too, the film represents the highest point so far in an increasingly interesting career. An affecting, illuminating, difficult, fascinating film.
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