Vera Drake

...The last third of the movie assumes a conventional form of tragedy and martyrdom...

...For years she's been performing illegal abortions, for free, on girls in trouble and wives with too many children to feed-frightened women with no money, who turn to her in desperation...

...Up till now, Vera has escaped detection...

...Is this incoherent, or a (bold) synthesis of moral opposites...

...But when one of the procedures goes awry, and a girl nearly dies, the law closes in...

...Leigh doesn't tell us how Vera got this way...

...The unwanted babies conceived by single mothers are about sex, while Vera is about family...

...Toting a satchel containing lye soap, a grater, and a red-rubber hose, she visits their dingy apartments, where she administers a toxic abortifacient...

...We can't see what, if any, impression Vera's own actions are making on her, until eventually we begin to wonder whether she even fully understands what she is doing...

...And when finally he zeroes in on the truth-she performs abortions, doesn't she?-Vera flinches in horror...

...what sounds first like a ritual of comfort is really a mechanism of denial...

...She's got a heart of gold, that woman," Stan muses to his brother, who agrees: "she's a diamond...

...Rand Richards Cooper NO CUP OF TEA Mike Leigh's 'Vera Drake' British director Mike Leigh came of age in the 1960s, and his movies deliver sensitive studies of working-class English life, with its signature mix of drear and cheer...

...His interests are psychological and sociological, and his portrayal of Vera as abortionist insists upon an ambiguity, or even an ambivalence, in which different viewers are likely to see the different shapes of their own commitments...

...Her denial isn't tactical, but psychological...

...That's not what I do...

...In a way, Vera Drake presents the flip side of the bullying sexual hungers displayed in Naked, Leigh's gritty 1994 study of a homeless man ravenous for sex and shelter in the streets of London...

...This option is denied the poorer women Vera services, and most reviewers have seen Vera's fearless perseverance as Leigh's tribute to "the heroism of abortion providers": "a radiant martyr" (David Edelstein, Slate...

...But if you can't feed 'em, you can't love 'em, can you...

...Or is it merely a mid-century, working-class sexual repression so overwhelming it is pathological...

...It is immensely to Leigh's credit that he shows this to be much, much more complicated than many think...

...when they can't manage...

...Nothing gleams or sparkles in this drab world except Vera's goodness...

...Yet Vera, we soon discover, has a secret life, kept hidden even from her family...

...I help young girls out," she says, "when...

...In parallel narratives Leigh contrasts the risks faced by Vera's impoverished patients with the safer lot of Susan, the daughter of an upper-class family whose house Vera cleans and who, after being raped by a brutal lout she is seeing, obtains a legal abortion assisted by nurses, doctors, even a psychiatrist...

...In one scene, a terrified teenaged girl asks, "But what is it I'm waiting for...

...Within Vera's family, meanwhile, reactions range from the grandstanding righteousness of her sister-in-law ("How can she be so selfish...

...From the moment Vera's world caves in, with the police literally knocking at her door, Staunton's face takes on the dazed, harrowed look of someone suffering a psychic break...

...It isn't too much of a stretch to say that psychologically, at least in cinematic terms, Vera is a kind of serial killer...

...to the hurt and outrage of her son ("It's little babiesl" he upbraids her), to the rationalizations of Reg, bursting out in defense of a working-class woman's right to abortion ("It's all right if you're rich...

...It is intended, we realize, less to diminish the dread of the procedure for her patients than for Vera herself...

...But we begin to hear something darker in this unvarying litany of bromides...

...Leigh puts all these arguments out on the table, perhaps a little too conveniently, as in an ethics seminar...

...Vera Drake follows a cleaning lady whose sunny disposition does daily battle with the postwar London gloom of 1950...

...Vera's is a world completely stricken of sex-her marriage is all flannel PJs and the fond peck on the cheek...

...Did she suffer a traumatic and unwanted pregnancy in her own youth...

...When a police detective interrogates her-"What is it that you do, Mrs...

...her son Sid, a dapper tailor's assistant...

...Bit by bit Leigh illuminates a troubling and comprehensive detachment...

...He presses: does she mean, when they're pregnant...

...a saintly figure" (Manohla Dargis, the New York Times...

...Her "heroism" rests on a near-total psychological com-partmentalization...

...Whatever she done," Vera's husband says, "she done it out of the kindness of her heart...

...If s creepy to hear her greeting her patients precisely the same way she announces afternoon tea-"Lef s put the kettle on, dear...

...the film captures a sentimental, working man's mother-love that Leigh both respects and fondly, gently satirizes...

...I help them start their bleeding again...

...But the saintly view of Vera slights the ambiguity in which Leigh wraps her-the subtle strangeness of her character, which unfolds as the film progresses...

...Veteran stage and TV actress Imelda Staunton plays Vera with near-perfect reticence, keeping her hidden behind a barricade of cheerful determination...

...An adoring family-her auto-mechanic husband, Stan...

...That's what you call it...

...At first glance, Vera Drake seems to offer a straightforward pitch for abortion rights...

...Leigh leaves little doubt that the law makes a pretty blunt instrument to use on someone like Vera Drake, especially in the hands of overbearing cops and pompous magistrates...

...How many girls may have died or become very ill...

...and Ethel's equally shy, shlumpy suitor, Reg-rely on Vera as their heart and soul...

...But in the end he isn't after a simple justification for Vera...

...Leigh implies that at some level, a profound split between erotic and familial love-sexual repression, in other words-both parallels and facilitates the psychological dissociation with which Vera practices abortion...

...and the engagement she engineers between her hopelessly shy daughter and the blandly sexless Reg promises more (or less) of the same...

...The truth must never be spoken, not even to herself...

...and in a symbolic sense she is lethally enforcing family values against the anarchic, antifamily forces of erotic life...

...Then she walks out, leaving the girl sobbing...

...She has no idea...

...She is both hero and monster...

...her timid wallflower of a daughter, Ethel...

...Initially, Vera's bedside patter with the frightened girls comes off as a generous attempt to reassure them (when they feel some pain "down below," she advises, they should get to the toilet and "just wait a bit...

...Whether kneeling to polish an andiron in a mansion of a wealthy employer, or sitting at her aged mother's bedside, or visiting the cramped flats where she looks in on elderly and ailing family friends, Vera is a paragon of stout, energetic good will- humming contentedly to herself, touting at every turn the cure-all of a "Cap-patay, dear...

...How exactly does she help them out...

...For it to come away, dear....It'11 all come away, and you'll be right as rain...

...It seems Vera has "helped" girls for decades without ever really clearly facing the nature of her actions, let alone the consequences...

...What critics have missed in Leigh's portrayal of Vera is a singular mix of affections-admiring, yes, but also appalled...

...Vera blinks in perplexity...

...Vera collapses in stammering, anguished euphemisms...