Word: leighs
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Directed by Mike Leigh...
Vera Drake seeks to answer that question while pondering the subjective nature of “good” and exploring whether it’s worth attempting. An intimate film about the lives of a small cast of characters, this simple masterpiece by director Mike Leigh manages to be at once philosophically expansive and physically claustrophobic. Personalities too large for their surroundings compound the effect of poverty on spaciousness—there is merely too little room to accommodate everyone, their needs for privacy and their individual desires. Leigh creates an economy of space, framing the lives...
Wait a minute. This is a Pixar cartoon? Instead of toys, bugs, monsters or funny fish, we get a midlife crisis and, in the first half-hour, enough domestic strife to fill a Mike Leigh film. But yes, this is Pixar, the studio that pretty much invented and perfected computer-animation entertainment, with such spectacular success that it wiped out the traditional approach that its distribution partner, Disney, had virtually patented. (The two animation titans have fallen into a rancorous dispute that's likely to end with Pixar's boss, Steve Jobs, taking the company elsewhere...
This very patient film reaches out and unshakably grips us, not least because of Imelda Staunton's heartbreaking performance as the simple-souled Vera but also because Leigh neither pleads nor prosecutes her case. It includes class issues--rich girls don't need Vera--and the obvious moral one, but they are stated by implication, never by declaration. The humanity of these puzzled little people in their claustrophobic world, drowning melodrama in teacups and evasions, is, in the end, shattering. --By Richard Schickel
This is, to put it mildly, unlikely material from which to fashion a near great movie. But writer-director Mike Leigh's Vera Drake is just such a film. He's famously a realist (Life Is Sweet, Naked, Secrets & Lies) and never more so than in this film. He simply recounts the story with unblinking objectivity. The almost comic cluelessness of Vera's family, the phlegmatic spirit of the policemen processing her case, the attitudes of her patients, ranging from the hysterical to the cool--they are all there. Yet there's nothing forced or movieish in Leigh's treatment...