I was lucky enough to see Vera Drake having absolutely no clue what it was about. I could guess from the very pretty hat Imelda Staunton wears in the photo on the poster the time, and from the brick wall out of focus to her left the place—although I am sure that brick walls exist in other cities too. London’s early Fifties are a particularly interesting historical moment to set a debate on a subject that will never cease to be controversial.
To his habit, Mike Leigh subverts any received cinematic narrative convention bringing the inciting incident quite far into the film. Up until things get shaken, we are invited step by step not just into a world we might not know, but into its mentality. It is a time of hardship in a city heavily scarred by the Blitz, where food is still being rationed and poverty is extreme. By the time we are revealed what Vera’s secret business is (here is the privilege of not knowing what that is), we are too familiar with the characters to elude a confrontation between their reactions and our own. Mike Leigh himself couldn’t have articulated it better when interviewed by Amy Raphael said, ‘An important thing about all my work is that it’s about looking at the world in such a way that you see every character as being rounded and at the centre of his or her universe. So we looked at it from the point of view of the people having abortions, of the abortionists, of the police, of the medical profession, and so on.’1 It won’t surprise us to find bits of our inevitably faceted thinking on the matter in every single character—from the more understanding to the unamenable, or the cynical.
If ever a definite position is taken by Leigh in the film, that’s an overall political one. Vera Drake is the portrayal of a world with no baddies, puppeteered by rules that despite their understandable ethical intentions, effectively put the wealthy and the poor in completely different positions. It was right in postwar Britain that Orwell published Animal Farm giving us one of the wittiest observations ever made on our society—‘All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.’ Not much had changed in Vera Rose Drake’s years. Not much has to this day.
1. From Mike Leigh on Mike Leigh, Edited by Amy Raphael (Faber, 2021).
