Vera Drake | Review

English filmmaker serves up a stew of emotion with the things that happen behind closed doors.

A Golden Lion winner at this year’s Venice film festival, Mike Leigh’s period drama is a compassionate character-study that offers an unflinching, realistic look into how scandal can leave a gash the size of the human heart. With Maria Full of Grace and the upcoming The Sea Inside, Fine Line Features have bought themselves a library of poignant hits.

Sometimes directors build atmosphere by coding their films with color motifs, but rarely has one witnessed the uncharacteristic combination of tender, love and care to the charcoal, mud tone colors of a working-class 50’s London. Nestled at 82 Essex drive are the Drakes, a family of good-spirited commoners headed by a busy-bee matriarch, whose motherly mannerisms extends itself into the entire community. In her fortune of meager possessions and a deep-loving family, she finds room for the more unfortunate, but the heart of the debate in Leigh’s solid screenplay asks: does the little old lady always do good?

Vera Drake looks at the co-existence between one morally wrong act and the tremendous good-doing deeds of a woman whose angel wings are entirely visible even with her mounds of overcoat. Yet again, Leigh enraptures his audience with another tale about a family held hostage to total devastation. Supported by a fine cast, this sees another great Leigh-film female character in Imelda Staunton whose Best actress performance delivers the faces of the neighborhood heroine and fallen angel. Leigh parallels the almost emblematic ritualistic pouring of a cup of tea with mini-sequences that show the routine of her other questionable act of goodness. The montage of the sequences almost blurs out the consequence of her gestures, leaving for an ending which is visible from the start but is rarely thought of during. The technical specs are A1 and the high-volume of close-ups brings the viewer gets knee-deep into the drama and when Vera is faced with the harsh reality, Leigh mutes the character, replacing dialogue with layer upon layers of emotions in grieving facial expressions.

Though, the subject matter ultimately carries an overcast of gloominess, it is in the profound examination of the human condition which makes one realize the brilliance of Mike Leigh as a filmmaker. He doesn’t provide the luxury of easy resolve for his characters and nor does he bring a preachy discourse to his works, instead, he lets the viewer in on how real people deal with tragedy or the tougher moments in life. After the uninteresting Taxi-driver tale of All or Nothing, Vera Drake is an affecting drama that will touch the nerve and which treats the notion of taboo with caring reflection instead of blatant opinion. .

Rating 3.5 stars