Vera Drake

Sometimes I wish I didn’t follow the movie biz so closely. By watching the news, Ebert & Roeper, and reading reviews I usually know a lot about a movie before I see it, sometimes more than I’d really like to know. I wish I hadn’t known Vera Drake was a housekeeper who, to help out poor girls in trouble, also performs abortions. That way the scene where she casually pulls out her syringes and cheese grater and soap and tells the girl to lie down and take off her knickers would have been a lot more shocking. The scene still has an impact, but it would have been nice if it had been a surprise.

That said, the film is excellent, if a bit slow at times. Every cast member is memorable, I can’t single anyone out. And imagine my surprise when I looked up Imelda Staunton at the IMDb and discovered that she’s 49 and quite the babe. She works a lot, so I must have seen her in several movies, but I never recognized her. It’s the best make-down job I’ve seen since Charlize Theron in Monster.

Naturally the film has been attacked as a pro-abortion polemic, and there is certainly no doubt where Mike Leigh, the director, stands on the issue, and I stand right beside him. I don’t think there’s a real heavy political message, but Leigh does point out that, in 1950, a rich girl could spend 100 guineas, see a bullshit psychologist, and have the procedure done quickly and with no fuss or stigma or lawbreaking. 100 guineas was a lot of money, so poor girls went to people like Vera or, more often, someone not nearly so nice. And if the abortion-is-murder crowd gets its way, it will have only one effect: poor women will have to resort to the back alley and the coat hanger again, and risk imprisonment if they go to the hospital with complications, while any woman who can afford a plane ticket to a civilized country will continue to have abortion on demand, just like they always have.