The title character in "Vera Drake" is a plump, middle-aged wife and mother who works cheerfully as a housekeeper for rich
people and performs a dizzying succession of good deeds in her spare time. She visits shut-ins, invites lonely bachelors over for tea with the family, sews patches on friends' tattered clothing -- oh, and often appears at women's houses to perform their abortions. What is most extraordinary about this film, written and directed by that master of British dreariness Mike Leigh ( "All or Nothing," "Secrets & Lies") and set in early 1950s London, is that while it is about abortion, it is not JUST about abortion, nor even JUST about the abortionist. Every character is richly drawn, every detail is perfect. Where many filmmakers would treat abortion as an enormous entree and serve it up without a thought to presentation, Leigh uses it as a centerpiece and surrounds it with an elegant buffet. Vera is acted with Oscar-worthy precision by Imelda Staunton, and if five better performances yet emerge this year and bump her out of the running, then it will have been a stunning year for actresses indeed. She makes the character more complex than she could have been, showing genuine sympathy for the people she attends to, yet remaining briskly efficient. She is nearly always out of breath from bustling about. Her instructions to her abortion patients, we realize, are almost word-for-word the same each time, and when she stops by the home of a shut-in -- including her own aged mother -- her conversation is not just light and merry but extremely brief. She never seems at a loss for words, because when all else fails, she suggests making tea, a superficial solution to what are often difficult problems. We know she's not terribly well-educated, and you get the feeling she's perhaps a little simple-minded, too, as if her desire to do good in the world is often at odds with her inability to process all the pain and suffering she sees.
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