“I help girls out.”
It’s 1950 in a working class suburb of London. In the midst of a joyously over-crowded engagement celebration between two equally lost souls, another couple announces their own unexpected happiness: a pregnancy. Though Vera and her husband Stanley can barely afford it, they open a new bottle of champagne, generously inviting in the promise of new life and new love, all too exciting for any monetary considerations. Riches are where you find it. And then, four police arrive to arrest Vera for administering abortions.
Mike Leigh, best known for directing films through a singularly grueling improvisational rehearsal process with his actors, typically sets his dramas in present-day London where the comedy, ample though it is, arises as a reflection of the deep pain hiding underneath the surface. Vera Drake (2004) is, in many ways, a reversal of Leigh’s usual formula. Set seventeen years before the United Kingdom legalized pregnancy terminations through the Abortion Act of 1967, Vera Drake sees Leigh playing in the sandbox of a period drama where the external tensions of post-war Europe converge with the conservative social pressures of a pre-progressive society.
Vera (Imelda Staunton), is a domestic care worker who magnanimously and exuberantly looks after her husband Stan (Phil Davis), her social butterfly of a son Sid (Daniel Mays) and her sheepishly withdrawn daughter Ethel (Alex Kelly). Around the community she is known as “good as gold,” a “diamond” who watches over her neighbors. She is also an abortionist; an identity she holds without her family’s knowledge and without any attempt at remuneration. “I take care of young girls,” as she tells the police chief who later arrests her. “It’s a service.”
Vera Drake is as much about the double life of its titular character as it is the deeply imbricated lives of the Drake family, which, aware of the lack of space they call their own, instead leans closer on each other. The inevitable moment of Vera’s arrest roughly midway through the film is realized in all of its devastating leadenness in part because Leigh is so interested in these small spaces - and the people who inhabit them. When the police finally arrive (on a tip from her partner, no less), the doom feels even more terrifying because Leigh has spent the last hour and fifteen minutes photographing the shoebox space the Drakes live in, which is currently overstuffed with seven family members and four police officers, not to mention the behind-the-scenes crew presumably hiding within the paper-thin walls.
It’s not just those spaces they inhabit but the liminal ones between them, too. As Vera, Imelda Staunton traipses between places with the same feather-like airiness we’d expect from Fred Astaire, popping into this flat to adjust a pillow and make a cuppa tea, into that flat to resituate a drifting leg on its attending ottoman. Neighbors sit on top of each other as delicately as the free-hanging spice rack above her stove, and this intermingling foreshadows the inevitability of outed secrets. While she swiftly attends to her community, Leigh accomplishes two tasks in one: presenting the inherent wall-to-wall clash of neighborly proximity and pre-anesthetizing Vera’s role as an abortionist. Vera is not necessarily a figure of feminist activism, but Leigh sets out to normalize the essentialism of this act of health care by dramatizing with almost lackadaisical off-handedness the quotidian manner in which she folds in terminations with the same weight as the folding of a blanket. Staunton approaches the abortion care scenes with the same breezy cheerfulness that she approaches her other caretaking duties. “The first thing to do is put the kettle on,” she tells one patient with an ear-to-ear smile. She’s just popping ‘round for a spot of tea, and also some essential care. “No need to be upset, I’m just here to help you.”
Leigh, who grew up in “this particular kind of working-class district with some relations living in slightly leafier districts up the road… [where] those two worlds were forever colliding,” presents in Vera Drake a London where the space you have is a privilege but not, necessarily, a determinate of happiness. The moment of Vera’s discovery is precisely disintegrative because the Drake family’s interwoven intimacy is as tightly constructed as their very home, a direct contrast to seeming miles of space between Susan (Sally Hawkins) and her mother (Lesley Manville), a wealthy family for whom she cleans. Vera dusts their massive, marble fireplace while Mrs. Wells can only muster a “you’re looking very flat-chested” to her daughter in conversation. Space to clean but none, apparently, for compassion, nor for solidarity. While Hawkins’ plastically chipper Susan has the access for what constitutes a “legal” abortion in 1950, her recourse is filtered through a Draconian set of older-male entrusted offices in which she must pretend to be psychologically disturbed to get the termination care she seeks, thus rendering her own journey in arguably more byzantine fashion than that which Vera herself administers.
As the community’s DNA is revealed, helix by helix, it is Vera’s open-minded kindness that stands out, and which will eventually be her undoing by a world so totally shriveled up in their own emotional and sexual repression. But it is counterintuitively through Sally Hawkins' Susan that we garner just how essential Vera’s care is. Lesley Manville’s Mrs. Wells is verbally assaultive, and Susan clearly doesn’t have many friends. In a world where abortion care is seen as tacitly wrong (and, for the most part, legally prohibitive) and treated akin to the manufacturing and sale of heroin, class privilege is a meaningless prerogative. Hawkins’ Susan is, in some ways, even more vulnerable than her working-class neighbors because at least they have the benefit of a robust community. Even though she finds a doctor that seems willing to help with the abortion, the legal route to abortion care is rife with patriarchal judgment, and one that begins with the assumption that anyone seeking abortive care must be inherently mentally troubled. That Susan is a victim of rape doesn’t matter in the eyes of the law, but the possibility that she might kill herself does because the psychiatrist can recommend her abotion only on the grounds that she’s mentally unstable. All this is so important to lay out with the knowledge that Vera will inevitably be found out in the harshest terms, because it’s not just the dearth of legal abortive options but the dearth of understanding, an understanding that Vera has in spades and the lack of which destroys lives.
That implicit magnanimity supports a multitude of women of various dispositions, classes, sexualities and races. One woman is clearly not ready for pregnancy, another already has seven children and lacks the financial flexibility to take care of an eighth. Another patient treats Vera’s visit as one might a cooky neighbor, drinking cocktails and smoking cigarettes while making demeaning gestures behind her back. Later, Vera visits a Black woman who is surprised that the care is so quick and is devastated to learn that Vera has to leave, a reminder that care goes beyond the medical act. One of the houses Vera visits is populated by a triumvirate of infirm depressives, including a matriarch who, though perpetually sick, must be the one to work as the only able-bodied family member. Vera tells her, “it’s not your fault,” to which the woman simply replies: “Try telling my boss that.”
It is this dichotomy in class and financial access that makes the moment of Vera’s arrest so piercingly frustrating, for Leigh forces us to watch Vera’s world crumble in extreme close-up even as her world so desperately cries out for her help. Her own family’s reactions to the revelation, meanwhile, is carefully textured and seeded from the film’s earliest moments. Ethel works on an electric bulb factory line, and her rote devotion to her job later manifests in a mute, resolute closeness to her mother during the agonizing days of the trial; Sid operates as a suit tailor catering to clueless customers like the one played by Chris O’Dowd, and his breezy comfortability within normative social circles causes him to react with indignant befuddlement to his mother’s “immorality.” Stanley, meanwhile, operates as second-in-command to his own brother at a car garage; his moral opposition to Vera’s particular proclivities are silenced in favor of loving devotion and understanding. All of their individual paths, so delicately threaded for the first two acts of Leigh’s film, makes for exorbitantly specific reactions to the revelation of their mother’s underground life.
That specificity is realized through Leigh’s infamous improvisational techniques, no more effectively employed than in the moment of the police’s arrival. Behind the scenes, only Imelda Staunton knew of her character’s secret identity, and none of them, including Staunton, knew that one day, four cops would burst the family’s bubble of contentment. In other words, as Leigh told an audience at the British Film Institute in October of 2021 as part of a retrospective on his work, “characters knew what they would know and no one knew what they wouldn’t know.” That mirroring of process with content is highly unusual, but the rigorous six months of characterization work, emanating as it did from the actors themselves, creates an organic reaction from all of them that makes its finished product as explosive as a tinderbox.
The police’s main interest is the legality, not the morality, but it is the latter upon which Vera is ultimately judged. As the police investigation gets closer to the Drake home, the guests continue to arrive to celebrate the engagement of Reg and Ethel, and Leigh, foreshadowing the coming storm, films the arrivals from within the small confines of the Drake hallway. Freestanding frames and hooks are barely flush with the thin walls and Dick Pope’s camera hovers just above Sid’s tall shoulders, a group of giddy party attendees happily crushed together. Vera invites them “come on, tuck in,” and they all giddily oblige. When the Bobbies arrive, the Drakes are in the middle of discussing where Reg and Ethel might live. Leigh has Dick Pope shoot their arrival through a small, four-paneled window in the living room, and the four policemen, led by Det. Inspector Webster (Peter Wight) walk out of their vehicle onto the lightly snow-dusted street. The family discusses Christmas plans, Stanley cheekily references future children and Frank and Joyce (Heather Craney) wordlessly negotiate when to make the announcement of their own, a pregnancy they didn’t expect. Almost as if Leigh is setting up this family for the highest and lowest of life’s ebbs and flows, Frank announces his wife’s pregnancy a mere five seconds before we hear the first knock on the door. Too caught up in their own joy, the family doesn’t seem to think it strange there is someone there, and Stanley is left to answer the door to all four policemen huddling in the narrow door frame of his humble home. Stanley, barely processing the news of his brother’s impending fatherhood, cheeks flush with the red of the Detective Inspector’s tie, can only lamely respond to the request to speak to Vera with “we’re having a party, my daughter’s just got engaged.” Now there are eleven people in this shoebox apartment, and Webster kindly says, “sorry to interrupt your celebrations but we must talk to Miss Vera Drake.”
Then the moment of realization as Leigh immediately cuts away from a band of plain-clothes detectives to the ruddy, ebullient face of Imelda Staunton that slowly drips down into abject horror. Ethel was once thought of as permanent shut-in, but Vera’s sly backstage maneuvering and insistence on the irrationality of romantic love (“we found each other, miracles do happen,” she says to her husband Stanley in an earlier scene) brings about an uncommon engagement she basks in as if it were her own; a woman who spends years helping women finally gets to celebrate a pregnancy of her own flesh and blood. These once-in-a-lifetime events paint Vera’s face flush with a double-shot of strawberry red, but the sight of the four police officers transforms that lush color into a beet purple of recognition: “I know why you’re here,” she tells Webster:
Webster: “Why are we here?”
Vera: “Because of what I do.”
Webster: “What is it that you do, Mrs. Drake?”
Vera: “I help young girls out.”
Webster: “How do you help them out?”
Vera: “When they can’t manage.”
And then later:
Webster: “You perform abortions, don’t you?”
Vera: “That’s not what I do dear. That’s what you call it, but I just help them out. They’ve got no one else to turn to, what else am I going to do but help them out?”
As the police escort Vera out of her tiny home, Leigh reverses the orientation of the shots which brought in so many visitors, backing out of the hallway, as the family insists it’s all a mistake. This small courtyard which has been the playground for Vera’s most delicate exploits becomes a dangerous cross-fire of leering eyes and gossip. As she’s escorted through the snowy street into a police car, Sid calls after his mom and a young boy peeks behind a curtained window. As with all Leigh’s films, discoveries are made in tiny moments. The manner of holding a glass, or letting eyes stay closed to savor a first kiss; here the cascading moments crescendo to the ultimate knowledge of Vera’s pregnancy terminations, a “ticking time bomb,” as Leigh himself called it, that can shake the ground underneath any family’s bliss, even a family with the stable fortitude of the Drake’s. It’s a moment positioned almost exactly mid-way through the film, and it is a mountain peak that serves as an apex for both the extremity of joy her family can experience and the harmonious fluidity of her community. For the rest of the way, Vera’s typical brand of chatty friendliness is quashed into near muteness, a stammering inability to both defend her actions and remain honest towards the authorities, insisting, even, that she still call them “sweetheart” and “dearie” even as they prepare to send her to prison. Her tiny figure shoved into the bottom recesses of the frame, Vera makes no attempt to hide what she’s done from either the investigators nor the judge (Jim Broadbent); partly out of an honest pride, partly out of deferential respect.
Vera gets sentenced to two and a half years of incarceration for violating the “Offences Against the Person Act” of 1861, ironic in its name considering who Vera is and self-evidently outdated even by the setting of the film. The community, meanwhile, suffers. Vera’s mother (Sandra Voe), a woman suffering potentially from dementia, doesn’t get looked after, and the family of invalids turn further inwards. The family members debate the morality of Vera’s work, and it is Vera’s future son-in-law Reg (Eddie Marsan) who passionately defends her more than anyone else: “Don’t seem fair. Look at my mum. Six of us in two rooms. It’s alright if you’re rich. But if you can’t feed ‘em, you can’t love ‘em, can you?”
Most heartbreakingly, though, is that tiny little space, the Drake living room. Now missing it’s exuberant matriarch, it somehow looks vacuous.