Vera Drake

Vera Drake
The film's theatrical poster.
Directed by	Mike Leigh
Produced by	Simon Channing-Williams
Written by	Mike Leigh
Starring	Imelda Staunton Richard Graham Eddie Marsan Anna Keaveney Alex Kelly Daniel Mays Phil Davis Sinead Matthews
Cinematography	Dick Pope
Editing by	Jim Clark
Distributed by	New Line Cinema Fine Line Features
Release date(s)	6 September 2004 (2004-09-06) (Italy) 7 January 2005 (2005-01-07) (United Kingdom)
Running time	125 minutes
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English

Vera Drake is a 2004 British film directed by Mike Leigh. It tells the story of a working class woman in London in 1950 who performs illegal abortions for women in need. It won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and it was nominated for three Academy Awards and won three BAFTAs.

Plot

Vera Drake (Imelda Staunton) is tirelessly devoted to her family, looking after her husband and children, her elderly mother, and a sick neighbour. Vera's daughter Ethel (Alex Kelly) works in a lightbulb factory, and Vera's son Sid (Daniel Mays) tailors men's suits. Her husband Stanley (Phil Davis) is a car mechanic. Although Vera and her family do not live lavishly, their strong family bonds hold them together, and Vera's constant small acts of kindness to the many people she encounters throughout her day are touching.

Vera works as a house cleaner. However, unbeknownst to her family, she also serves as a backroom abortionist. She receives no money for this, believing her help to be an act of generosity. However, her partner Lily (Ruth Sheen), a hard-bitten wheeler-dealer, who also carries on a black-market trade in scarce postwar foodstuffs, charges two guineas (GB£48 in 2005) for arranging the abortions, without Vera's knowledge.

To illustrate the contrast between the classes, the film also contains a sub-plot about a character named Susan (Sally Hawkins), the daughter of one of Vera's upper-class employers. Susan is raped by her date one evening, becomes pregnant, and asks a friend to put her in contact with a doctor, through whom she can obtain an abortion. The doctor first refers her to a psychiatrist, who prompts her to answer questions in a certain way, so that he can recommend an abortion on legal grounds; i.e. that she has a family history of mental illness and that she may commit suicide if not allowed to terminate the pregnancy. The abortion costs her a hundred guineas (GB£2400 in 2005).^[1]

After one of her patients nearly dies, Vera is arrested by the police and taken into custody for questioning. She is held overnight and appears before a magistrate the next morning. There, she is granted bail of £50 to re-appear in three weeks time. Her son, Sid, is disgusted by his mother's secret activities and tells his father that he doesn't think that he can forgive her. Vera's newly pregnant sister-in-law feels the same way.

Vera is bailed to appear at the Old Bailey in a few weeks time. None of Vera's employers will give her a character reference. Her solicitor thinks she will receive the minimum sentence of 18 months in jail; the judge eventually sentences her to two and a half years imprisonment. This has a devastating effect on all the people who rely on Vera to visit them.

Background

In Vera Drake, Leigh incorporated elements of his own childhood. He grew up in north Salford, Lancashire, and experienced a very ordinary but socio-economically mixed life as the son of a doctor and a midwife. In the book The Cinema of Mike Leigh: A Sense of the Real, Leigh said, "I lived in this particular kind of working-class district with some relations living in slightly leafier districts up the road. So there was always a tension, or at least a duality: those two worlds were forever colliding. So you constantly get the one world and its relationship with the other going on in my films".^[2]

Production

Mike Leigh is known to use unusual methods to achieve realism in his films. "Leigh’s actors literally have to find their characters through improvisation and research the ways people in specific communities speak and behave. Leigh and his cast immerse themselves in the local life before creating the story" (1994: 7: Watson 29). Critic Roger Ebert explains:

His method is to gather a cast for weeks or months of improvisation in which they create and explore their characters. I don’t think the technique has ever worked better than here; the family life in those cramped little rooms is so palpably real that as the others wait around the dining table while Vera speaks to policeman behind the kitchen door, I felt as if I were waiting there with them. It’s not that we 'identify' so much as that the film quietly and firmly includes us.^[3]

Leigh often uses improvisation in order to capture his actors' unscripted emotions. When filming Vera Drake, only Imelda Staunton knew ahead of time that the subject of the film was abortion. None of the cast members playing the family members, including Staunton, knew that Vera was to be arrested until the moment the actors playing the police knocked on the door of the house they were using for rehearsals. Their genuine reactions of shock and confusion provided the raw material for their dialogue and actions.

Themes

In this film, as in other Leigh works, such as High Hopes, the audience can observe the different social classes interacting. The Drakes are a working class family, while Stanley’s brother Frank and his wife Joyce have moved into the middle class. Susan and her mother are upper class. Owing to Susan's social status, she is able to arrange and pay for a safe abortion, while the women assisted by Vera are not.

The importance of family is an ongoing theme in the film. Jim Leach argues that "While Leigh seems to offer a fairly conservative view of gender politics through his recurring female characters who want to become mothers, his films highlight the discrepancy between the ideological emphasis on the importance of family and the actual social conditions that place external and internal pressures on family relationships" (61). In Vera Drake the character of Joyce, Frank's wife, who claims that she wants to become a mother, is also depicted as the most selfish character in the film. Barely middle-class and insecure, she is preoccupied with material wealth and improving her social status. Her response to Vera's arrest is to distance herself from this shame and embarrassment, though her long-awaited pregnancy plays a role in her reaction. Vera's own household, by contrast, is filled with warmth, laughter, and uncomplicated happiness. Vera and Stanley Drake have a strong marriage, and after Vera’s secret emerges, although the family has mixed feelings about what she has done, they remain loyal to her.

Another significant theme involves morality versus legality. Morally, Vera believes that she is doing the right thing by "helping out" women who do not wish to give birth. She feels driven to perform these procedures out of what she feels is charity, and her personal understanding of the consequences of unwanted pregnancies in her socio-economic environment. Vera’s intentions, however, are irrelevant in a court of law. It is noteworthy that Vera's son Sid strongly represents the anti-abortion position and that the representatives of law and authority—doctors and nurses, the police, and the judge, are not presented as villains but rather as decent people who are simply doing their jobs properly in the context of early twentieth century (1950) legal and social mores. Another theme is the male ignorance of the choices women must make when faced with an unwanted pregnancy. The anxiety,stress and pain experienced by a woman going through the whole ordeal (from discovering they are pregnant to the heart-wrenching decision to have an abortion) can never fully be understood by a male. Hence Sid's reaction when he finds out what his mother has done-he does not understand the ramifications of not having the abortion. In contrast, the female police clerk in charge of Vera during her interrogation and arrest displays perhaps as much sympathy as her job would allow.

Responses

The film was a critical success. The website Metacritic, which compiles and averages reviews from leading film critics, gave it a score of 83 out of 100.^[4] Review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reports the film as holding an overall 92% approval rating based on 155 reviews, with a rating average of 7.9 out of 10. The site's general consensus is that,"with a piercingly powerful performance by Imelda Staunton, Vera Drake brings teeming humanity to the controversial subject of abortion."^[5]

As of 9 April 2006, Vera Drake had grossed $12,941,817 at the box office worldwide, including over $3.7 million in the U.S.^[6]

The film has attracted some criticism from those who worked in midwifery during the 1950s. The chief concern is the method of abortion used by Vera Drake in the film. This involves using a Higginson bulb syringe filled with a solution of warm, soapy water and disinfectant, which is inserted into the woman's uterus. This method is claimed by Jennifer Worth, a nurse and midwife in the 1950s and 1960s, to be invariably fatal. She calls the film itself "dangerous", as it could be shown in countries where abortion is illegal and the method depicted copied by desperate women.^[7]

Awards and nominations

• 2004 European Film Awards - won Best Actress and nominated for Best Film
• 2004 Venice Film Festival - won Golden Lion for Best Film & Volpi Cup for Best Actress
• 2005 Golden Globes - nominated for Best Actress - Motion Picture Drama
• 2004 Academy Awards - nominated for Best Actress, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay
• 2005 BAFTAs - won Best Director, Best Actress in a Leading Role and Costume Design (for Jacqueline Durran). Nominated for Best Film, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, and Best British Film.

See also

• Land and Freedom
• Abortion in the United Kingdom

References

Further reading

• Fuller, Graham, Mike Leigh On Mike Leigh, Faber, 2008, 438pp, ISBN 9780571204694

External links

• Official website
• Vera Drake at the Internet Movie Database
• Vera Drake at Rotten Tomatoes
• Vera Drake at Metacritic
• Vera Drake at Box Office Mojo
• AbsoluteNow.com: Vera Drake's long synopsis