Vera Drake

[woke up this morning to a perfect blue sky -- well the sky wasn't blue when I woke, but you can tell that was what it would turn into. cool and crisp. lovely.]

I left the theatre with my guts wrenched, a sense of hollowness and powerlessness fitting to the subject of the movie: abortion in 1950 England. Vera Drake 'helps young women in trouble' simply out of kindness and sympathy, for no remuneration, though the person who puts her in touch with her clients does make a clean profit. Yet Vera is the one who faces punishment. Vera, who, because of her sheer goodness and her seemingly super human ability to be blind to the horrors of human existence, is the least equipped to face the punishment.

Mike Leigh fills his movie with contrasts. We see Vera living in dark, cramped tenement housing, but she keeps things clean and tidy and as bright as they can be, and so has it better than some of her neighbors who are incapacitated in various ways. But she has it far worse than those in the homes she cleans. They don't see her or her life, and it is the men of these very households who sit in judgement of her at court. Even as their daughters secretly secure their own, wholly sanitary and safe, abortions by telling doctors and psychiatrists what they need to hear (even if it may or may not be true) and handing over cash in amounts that Vera and her clientele would never see in a lifetime. We get a glimpse of these daughters through Susan, the daughter in one of the soulless homes Vera cleans. In many ways Susan is the counterpart to Vera's own daughter Ethel; they are both painfully shy and meek. But the privileges of class cannot help Susan when she is date-raped and finds herself pregnant. She manages to pull herself together enough to get herself out of trouble. In a similar way, Ethel manages enough charm to endear herself to the war-scarred Reg, and her soul is revealed in the way she stands by her mum. Through the men, we see a contrast between the moral and the legal judgement of Vera. On the one hand, the men who have been through war and hard times, and who have known Vera, are able to understand Vera's actions and to forgive her, and on the other, the men of privilege who sit on the court find Vera guilty of one of the most heinous of crimes.

And then there is Vera, someone who in her simplicity cannot lie to the police, or even fail to confess. She knows what she does is against the law, and at some level she thinks it is wrong. Yet she also at some level knows that it is not her place to judge the women she has helped. She finds her way to them because they are in trouble -- a trouble that far exceeds whatever failures of judgement might have allowed it to visit them. But Vera is someone who works at the level of intuition, and though her sensibility is good she is neither educated enough nor discursively minded enough to be able to articulate those intuitions in a way that might either change the system or persuade the court to grant clemency. Vera is someone whose actions reflect all the complexity of thinking about abortion, but who has no voice to express those thoughts.

It our identification with Vera Drake that has us walking out of the theatres feeling haunted.