an early morning review

Film Title:  Vera Drake

Describe the film in one sentence:  A cheery working class woman in postwar Britain who enjoys doing good things for people is caught up in the legal system when an attempt at terminating a young woman’s pregnancy leads to serious medical complications.

Genre:  I've never seen anything like this, although the last 1/4 has a bit of courtroom drama to it.

Who should see this film? Anyone interested in a morally complex portrait of abortion politics. Anyone interested in seeing Imelda Staunton’s phenomenal acting job.

Who should not see this film? Anyone who has a black-and-white view of abortion politics.  Or wait – maybe you should see it, but certainly with an open mind.  Also, this is obviously a drama, and is unsuitable for people who want action and sex.  Finally, the accents are quite thick in this movie. If you aren’t familiar with the accent, it can take a lot of work to parse some of the dialogue.   

Do I want those two hours of my life back?  No.

Anything else?  This film is really a very beautiful and strange homage to a very beautiful and strange person: Vera Drake. The movie is worth watching mostly for the peculiarity of this character, and the phenomenal talent of Imelda Staunton, who plays her. Vera is an oddly optimistic person, given the poverty of her environment. She takes great pleasure in sharing what little she has with others, and in doing good for people. This involves caring for disabled veterans and their shattered families, setting up single shell-shocked men with eligible young women, and on Friday afternoons, inducing “terminations” (a.k.a. abortions) for women who – for a myriad of reasons – do not wish to be pregnant.

The film itself, as I read it, is ultimately pro-choice, but is very even-handed and could be read in a number of ways. A lot of women are in desperate circumstances: unable to support a child on their own, already raising seven children, the victim of rape. Some of them are in circumstances of their own making: single party girls who have clearly done this before, women having affairs while their husbands are abroad, and so on. Some of the women are deeply troubled by their decisions to abort; for others, it is merely a routine. I found it refreshing that the movie resisted taking either easy position: that all abortions are obviously irresponsible, or that no abortions are.

The pro-choice message, I felt, came across in two ways. The first was in what I felt to be a really awkward sideplot (and part of the reason why my ranking is as low as it is). In this sideplot, we get a taste of what abortion is like in this same time period for the wealthy. It is highly bureaucratized: you go to a doctor who confirms the pregnancy and sends you to a psychiatrist. You tell the psychiatrist that you will kill yourself if you can’t have the abortion, and you throw in a story about a crazy aunt who did just that for extra measure. He then sends you to a country hospital for the weekend (so you can tell your friends you just went on a mini-break) where the procedure and recovery take place under the watchful eyes of medical professionals. This story is not really connected to the rest of the film, and so it seems to be there only to show the hypocrisy of the system that finally criminalizes what Vera Drake does for the lower classes (and, I might add, for free).

The second part of the pro-choice message, to me, was in the final scenes, when Vera encounters other working class women imprisoned for the same crime. Here, she discovers that some of these women are repeat offenders – which seems to imply that criminalization will hardly stop abortions, nor make them safe. And then this is the end of the film: Vera walking away from that conversation, and a shot of her depressed family, sitting around the table at home without her. All criminalization seems to do is to rip a good woman away from her loved ones who need her.

Anyhow, Vera is a peculiar character. She clearly believes that she is helping women by terminating their pregnancies; she doesn’t believe (until she is arrested) that what she is doing could cause any harm to them. In one particularly disturbing scene, she has just finished up with a woman who is completely freaked out by the procedure (which involves just a simple squirting of some soapy liquid into the uterus to trigger a miscarriage over a couple of days). The woman is asking her all sorts of questions about what happens if something goes wrong, will Vera come back to check on her, what if she dies in her flat all by herself and no one knows, etc. Vera seems a bit befuddled, as if she doesn’t quite know what to say, so she smiles and says “It’ll be alright dear” or some such thing, and then leaves. She clearly lacks a bedside manner, she lacks the kind of follow up care that say the wealthy girls get in the countryside – and what’s disturbing is that she doesn’t even seem to notice that she isn’t giving these women all the care that they might reasonably need, even as she thinks she is doing them good.

On top of that, there’s the peculiar matter of whether she really does believe that what she’s doing is right. She says she’s helping people. But until the police arrest her, she hasn’t told anyone in her family about this particular aspect of her altruism. In fact, she is terrified at the prospect of telling them. (The most moving scene is a lengthy shot of her face as the consequences of her arrest dawn on her – here is where you really see Imelda Staunton’s talent in conveying so much without words, and frankly, without even much change in her expression. The movie is worth watching solely for this scene.) Then she starts apologizing for having done this (and of course she is mortified that her actions sent a young woman to the operating table). So, is she convinced that she has been doing good? Is the fact that she has harmed someone shaking her confidence in the moral value of performing abortions? Is she haunted by the thought that maybe some of her other clients may have passed away, unknown and alone, in their flats like that one woman had feared?

And here’s where I think the brilliance of the storytelling lies: that it is deeply troubling for black-and-white abortion politics. If you are pro-choice, it’s an argument for universal access to safe abortions for those who choose to have them, but it is also a story about a woman whose conviction in the rightness of what she has been doing for 20 or more years is shaken by one case gone bad. If you are pro-life, then it’s a story about the dangers of abortion, but also one in which the protagonist does understand herself (for at least most of the movie) as helping people, begging the question: if these women are set on having abortions, what good does it do to refuse them, and force them to get one outside of the medical system? Everyone’s convictions are troubled, I think, in a productive way by this movie.

Phew. That was a mouthful. I’ll just say in conclusion that there were a few weak bits to the movie, which is why it isn’t getting a higher ranking. Also, while it is a drama, it isn’t full of durm und strang. Like Vera herself, it’s mostly a calm, pleasant affair. I found it was a movie that slowly grabbed onto me, and let go of me very slowly at the end. I didn’t, in other words, find myself emotionally caught up in the drama, which disappointed me a bit. I wanted to be a lot more enthusiastic about the film than I ended up being. It’s a peculiar film, though, and even now I find myself wanting to recommend it to you more strongly than I did when the credits started to roll. Like Vera, it ever-so-gently grows on you.

Rating on the Knitty Professometer: On Gauge/KnitPicks

Comments

[Chris]

Thanks for the thoughtful review. I almost feel as if I've seen the film already!

[Jasmin]

I truly enjoyed it as well, although I felt that when she fell apart at the end it wasn't true to her character.

I didn't see her saying "It'll be all right" as a sign of lack of care, rather, not feeling/knowing that there could be complications.

[Anne]

I saw it a couple of years ago. I guess it reveals my own black & white politics, because I recall seeing Vera in only a positive light. I thought she was afraid of telling her family because it was illegal and surrounded by an enormous taboo. (For some reason I remember it being set in Ireland...)