Word: staunton
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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. Imelda Staunton gives a tight performance as the title character, a mid-century London mother who tests light bulbs in a factory and keeps house for the wealthy to provide for her children and aged mother. Somehow, she still finds the time to invite neighbors over to her apartment...
...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. Imelda Staunton gives a tight performance as the title character, a mid-century London mother who tests light bulbs in a factory and keeps house for the wealthy to provide for her children and aged mother. Somehow, she still finds the time to invite neighbors over to her apartment...
...Imelda Staunton gives a tight performance as the title character, a mid-century London mother who tests light bulbs in a factory and keeps house for the wealthy to provide for her children and aged mother. Somehow, she still finds the time to invite neighbors over to her apartment for tea and a matchmaking session. In her “spare” time, she performs simple abortions to “help out young girls,” as she conceives of it, in a British cultural climate in which doing so is almost unthinkably wrong...
...Staunton received the award for best actress at the Venice International Film Festival this year, a fitting prize for her exemplary work, but she is not alone in this accomplished ensemble. The acting throughout is of extraordinary quality: a film that could have been all about a message becomes instead a portrait of a time, a place and a family. That in itself is a triumph, and something that makes Vera Drake stand out from the crowd...
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