Mike Leigh: Family Films

The first time I ever heard of the English director Mike Leigh was in a great New Yorker article by Terrence Rafferty, published some time in the early 1990s. I remember precious little about what it said but I knew just from reading it -- before I had seen a single Leigh film -- that I liked him. He was my idea of a filmmaker: productive, worked with a small company, made intimate dramas about life at the domestic level. Seeing his work did not disappoint, even when it seemed a little "too English," when his people started yammering about in their rural idioms and I had to rewind scenes and listen carefully just to get the jokes.

One thing that came clear to me after seeing Leigh's latest, Vera Drake, is that Leigh is especially skilled at what might be called "family films," a phrase in need of expansion. Instead of meaning "suitable for the kids," let it mean something similar to "family novel," which accomodates both the generous vision of Tolstoy and the tight focus of Flaubert or Anne Tyler. Mike Leigh makes films about a lot of things, but families are his natural subject. This may have something to do with his preferred method of working, which involves shaping the material in rehearsal, sometimes involving members of a loose repertory group who reappear from film to film. He has a feel for the character of a family, like a silent visitor who is curious, interested and sympathetic.

Vera Drake is the story of an English maid in the early 1950s who is arrested and tried for performing abortions on the side, and it too is centered on the idea of family. It's also a first-class example of his particular brand of working-class realism, for which he has a democratic knack, like Ken Loach; a neo-Realist knack, you might say, personal and political.

Well before we get to Vera's story, we meet her family, and Leigh takes his time letting us settle into it. Vera, played to perfection by Imelda Staunton, is a hearty soul; a domestic who looks after several homes, as well as her own, and also cares for her dying mother. Hers isn't a grim life, or at least she doesn't see it that way; her day to day disposition suggests no problem can't be settled by a good cup of tea. She and her husband, George (Richard Graham) who operates a garage with his brother, are the picture of middle-class content: they both work hard, enjoy what they do, and they're still happily in love after decades together. The Drakes have two children; a shy and homely daughter Ethel (Alex Kelly) who doesn't seem likely to ever find a boyfriend (and -- in a sweet and funny subplot -- does) and a gregarious, obnoxious son Sid (Daniel Mays).

Among her other tasks, Vera also performs abortions for poor girls, the ones without money or connections. She's the opposite of what we think of as a "back street abortionist." She offers her services for free, and in the place of sharp instruments she uses a carbolic soap solution that induces miscarriage and, so far as she knows, is perfectly safe. She's also naive. She doesn't know that the greedy go-between for her troubled clients has been charging a fee, or that her abortion method is actually borderline lethal. After the near-death of one of her clients, Vera is arrested, her life and family -- who don't know about her work as an abortionist -- come crashing down.

She is also, as far as the film is concerned, less the villain than society, and while that may sound like a lame, socially conscious point, the film makes it with powerful conviction. Leigh has a distinct feel for how the subtle repressiveness of 1950s culture seeps into the lives and the language of everyone. When Vera applies her treatment to her clients, she never uses words like abortion or baby or pregnancy; she talks about "taking it away." After her arrest -- in the single most powerful scene of the movie -- she can only describe what she does to her husband in a hushed, pained whisper. He in turn can barely find the words to broach the subject with his brother. Graham is superb in this role of a man who finds himself completely conflicted in his feelings about his wife.

The politics of a film like this are fairly obvious before you walk in the door; pro-choice and pro-family, which is exactly what Vera is. She loves her own children deeply, she's thrilled for her daughter's marriage and later for her sister-in-law, who on the eve of Vera's arrest announces she's pregnant.

But there is, also, something a little strange, maybe, about the movie's politics, particularly when compared with Leigh's 1990 Life is Sweet. One of the wonderfully unsettling facets of that great film -- about the workaday life of a Middlesex family who could have been the Drake's neighbors in another time -- is that it seemed almost anti-abortion, especially in an overwhelmingly powerful scene near the end, when the chirpy working-class mother played by Alison Steadman talks about why she chose not to have an abortion in her early marriage -- despite being poor and broke -- and even says, with the director's seeming approval, that she doesn't believe in it. There was a startling reality to the moment, regardless of your position on the issue; it seemed true to this character. I was less convinced by the money quote in Vera Drake, tenderly uttered by Alex's new boyfriend: "If you can't feed them, you can't love them."

Besides being a glaringly untrue statement -- utterly destitute women love their children all the time -- it sounded forced, and the way the movie addressed the complexities of the issue seemed to me like a lot of preaching to the choir. The family rallies `round Vera, eventually. While the movie has a genuinely loving and gritty feel to it, near the end you get the feeling Leigh is playing with a stacked deck.

P.S. I was rather startled by the following note in the Guardian review: "So far, public opinion stays resolutely pro-abortion - but the religious right, spurred on by US politics, keeps pushing for new limits. Even David Steel, author of the original 1967 reform, now wants the present 24-week limit cut. New pictures of foetuses `walking' are guaranteed headlines in rightwing papers. In schools, abortion is presented as a subject for abstract debate. When does a foetus acquire human rights? When does life begin?"

Rather a discomfiting note on writer Polly Toynbee's part -- she's distressed that the issue is even up for debate. News flash, Polly: a hundred years from now, it will still be.