Vera Drake (Les Films Alain Sarde, British Film Council, Inside Track Productions, 2004)

In Memoriam: Roe v. Wade, January 22, 1973-August 30, 2021.

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I’ve often commemorated the deaths of important individuals in the entertainment business by running one of their movies as an envoi, but last night I did that as a memorial not to a person, but to a human right. With the U.S. Supreme Court’s current ultra-Right majority having let stand that totally bonkers anti-abortion law in Texas that empowers private citizens to sue anyone who helps someone get an abortion (including an Uber driver who takes her to the clinic) and collect $10,000 plus lawyers’ fees for both sides, and obviously ready to consign the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision to the scrap heap, last night seemed like the right time to run Mike Leigh’s 2004 British film Vera Drake. Set in 1950 and “written” as well as directed by Leigh (though he said that the “screenplay” which won him an Academy Award nomination didn’t exist because the film was almost totally improvised: “The film is the screenplay,” Leigh said), Vera Drake deals with a middle-aged working-class British woman, Vera Drake (Imelda Staunton), living in London in 1950. She works as a domestic for four well-off families and has a long-term husband named Stan (Phil Davis) who works for an auto-repair garage owned by his brother Frank (Adrian Scarborough). They have two children in their early 20’s, son Sid (Daniel Mays), who works as a tailor, and daughter Ethel (Alex Kelly). Vera is also the sole caregiver for her disabled mother, who lives in the apartment with them.

Vera is drawn as a good-hearted woman who can’t resist helping other people in need – like a lonely young man in her building whom she offers a meal – and it soon develops that one of the ways she has figured out how to help other people is to visit women who’ve become pregnant and administer D.I.Y. abortions. She approaches this task with at least some care for the welfare of her patients – she uses a syringe to pump water inside them to induce an abortion instead of using knitting needles, coat hangers or anything else that dangerous (and when she’s finally busted she indignantly says no when a police interrogator asks her if she’s done abortions with such rough tools), and she brings a bottle of disinfectant and a bar of carbolic soap (which she grates with a cheese grater) to try to make the procedure as sanitary as possible under the circumstances. Leign and Staunton carefully leave us uncertain as to whether, or to what extent, Vera is aware of the legal risks she’s running with these procedures, but she regards them as so matter-of-fact that when she’s finally busted she can’t tell the police for certain when she started. The film parallels her story with that of a more well-to-do young woman who gets pregnant via a date rape and seeks out a legal abortion – which not only requires her to pay 100 guineas in advance (the guinea was one of Britain’s weirdest inventions, a non-existent currency unit, really a pound plus a shilling, which was used by upper-class stores in their pricing for snob appeal) to the doctor but required her to seek out a psychiatrist (at still more expense) and convince him that she has a history of mental illness in her family and would be at risk of suicide. What’s more, she has to do all this on her own because she’s scared to death of telling her parents she got “in trouble.”

Eventually Vera gets busted when one of her patients, Nellie (Anna Keaveney), goes into complications and has to be taken to a hospital. The staff there (including a nurse called “Sister” who’s wearing a nun’s hat – though my impression is then nurses in Britain were routinely referred to as “sisters” whether or not they were actually nuns) have a legal obligation, once they examine Nellie and realize a “procedure” was performed on her, to report it to the police, and the cops duly investigate and get Vera to issue a statement “under caution” – British law required that arrestees be warned that whatever they said could be used as evidence against them decades before American law did, and in one of the Sherlock Holmes stories, “The Adventure of the Dancing Men,” the British cops who arrest an American criminal give him that warning with what Sir Arthur Conan Doyle calls “the magnificent fair play of the British criminal law.” Vera ends up having to drain her family’s savings to hire two lawyers, a solicitor to handle her booking and arraignment and a barrister to represent her in criminal court – where she pleads guilty, expecting to get a light sentence because she’s never been in trouble with the law before. Instead she gets 2 ½ years from a judge (Jim Broadbent, who’d starred in some of Leigh’s previous films but agreed to play a relatively minor, though important, part here) who insists that he has to be harsh on her “as a deterrent to others.” When Vera finally goes to prison, virtually all her fellow inmates (at least the ones we get to see) are also in for performing illegal abortions, and they assure her she probably won’t have to serve her full sentence.

But what Mike Leigh is really interested in during the final stages of his film is the effect Vera’s arrest and conviction has on her family and their friends. Her husband Stan and his brother stand behind her, but Frank’s snooty and pretentious wife doesn’t – she says she’ll stop by on Christmas (Vera’s arrest took place in late November and her conviction in January) but only long enough to say hello, have a drink and then leave. Vera’s son Sid has a moralistic hissy-fit and denounces her, though daughter Ethel stays loyal. When Vera’s lawyer asks the four people she’s worked for as a domestic to testify as character witnesses, all of them refuse. The final shot of the film is of the Drake family, including Vera’s disabled mother, nervously and uneasily facing the prospect of life without her for two years or more.

Aside from watching this movie on the eve of the success of America’s radical-Right in abolishing abortion rights for American women in the U.S.’s second-largest state and all other parts of the country where Republicans are in control, Vera Drake was also an interesting film to see the night after we screened Alexander Dovzhenko’s Earth, since the two movies stand at opposite poles for how you make a political film. Like Bertolt Brecht’s so-called “epic” plays. Earth treats its characters not as individual human beings but as representatives of their social classes, and the conflicts between them are the conflicts of their class positions. Mike Leigh’s method is the exact opposite: he works as hard as he can to create characters who are deeply, richly drawn as human beings, and their conflicts and struggles are those of normal humanity. Indeed, if Vera Drake has a point it is that laws that force women to bear unwanted children are wrong precisely because they get in the way of their ability to take care of themselves as people and deal with their problems in human ways. Vera gets into the business of illegal abortions in the first place because she’s the sort of person who can’t turn away from anyone in need without trying to help them – and that includes women whose lives are about to be ruined by unwanted pregnancies, whether they’re young girls screwed over (in both senses!) by irresponsible boyfriends or long-term married couples (one of her patients has already had seven children with her husband and simply can’t face another baby, either psychologically, emotionally or financially).

It’s hard to imagine anyone who isn’t already pro-choice liking this movie (though there might be a few pro-lifers out there who could see something in Vera’s actions to sympathize with even if they considered what she did was morally wrong), and in an era in which this, like so many of the defining issues of the “culture war,” has become so highly polarized that anti-abortion activists literally don’t see any contradiction in killing abortion providers in the name of being “pro-life,” Mike Leigh’s quiet, understated approach to the issue is both a welcome relief from the bitterness of the debate, especially in the U.S. (with anti-abortion forces regarding Roe v. Wade alongside Dred Scott v. Sandford and Plessy v. Ferguson as the three worst decisions the U.S. Supreme Court ever rendered, and comparing abortion to slavery and the Holocaust; and pro-choicers like me insisting that it’s banning abortion that is morally equivalent to slavery because it essentially holds women hostages to their wombs) and a reminder that political decisions inevitably have human consequences. One of the things I like about the movie its incessant recitation during the court proceedings against Vera that she’s being charged with violating a law called the “Offenses Against Persons Act” that was originally passed in 1861. As I noted above, it’s not altogether clear from the movie just how much awareness Vera has of the legal risks she’s running in what she obviously sees as yet another way she’s helping people in need out of the kindness of her heart (she insists that she has never taken money to perform an abortion, and she reacts bitterly when she finds that a friend from childhood who was referring patients to her was charging them two guineas apiece for the service), and it’s certain she doesn’t know the ins and outs of the legal system or the particulars of the law she’s suddenly been accused of violating.

To film this story Mike Leigh adopted a practice similar to the way D. W. Griffith made his great silent classics: Griffith was notorious for never writing down his scripts and for telling the actors only as much as they needed to know to act the scene he was about to shoot. Leigh was a little more “Method” than that – he told all the actors to come up with a backstory for their characters and keep it in mind as they shot – but he told them very little about what was going on. According to an imdb.com “Trivia” post, Leigh doesn’t even tell any of his cast members except Imelda Staunton that the film was about abortion until the point in the story when their characters first find out that Vera is performing illegal abortions. And in the scene in which the police crash Vera’s home while she and her family are having Sunday dinner and arrest her, the actors playing her relatives didn’t know that the scene would involve the police and the actors playing the cops weren’t told how they could expect the family to react. This is a very chancy and highly problematic way to make a movie, especially a talkie (some directors who’ve tried to have their actors improvise a film have come up with a drearily paced bore with actors fumbling, even more than people do in real life, to articulate themselves as their characters presumably would), but in this case it worked triumphantly.

It’s helped by a typically great British cast – what is it about the United Kingdom that keeps producing the best actors in the world? Genes? The climate? Stage training? A theatrical tradition that stretches back at least 400 years to the man who’s generally considered the greatest playwright of all time, William Shakespeare? Though there are enough accounts of the British stage to indicate that Britain has produced enough ego-driven divas of both genders to account for its share, somehow when the curtains go up or the cameras start rolling British actors drop their pretensions and achieve total identification with the people the story tells us they are. In that respect, Vera Drake is a typical British movie in that there isn’t one strong performance that grips the screen (even in a film named after her character, Imelda Staunton does her best not to stand out and instead remains a “first among equals” with her cast mates, and while in the U.S. this part would have been cast with a veteran actress looking for roles she can play at “a certain age” and still show off, Staunton’s very homeliness and absence of traditional “star quality” become key elements in her characterization). Instead there are a whole bunch of understated but first-rate actors who make us believe in these people and identify emotionally with them. Aside from its obvious timeliness right now – with the American Right proclaiming a victory in its decades-long holy war against abortion and asserting the “right” of both government and private citizens to involve themselves directly in women’s medical decisions about their own bodies even while loudly protesting COVID-19 vaccination campaigns with the slogan, “My Body, My Choice” – Vera Drake is a great film precisely because of its understatement, its making its political prounoucements not through stunning visuals and cardboard characters but by presenting real people in real human situations and showing how a bad law can inspire a good person to resist it despite the risk – not only of arrest and imprisonment but traumatizing the members of her family – herself and those around her for whom she cares the most.