Word: vera
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Vera Drake...
...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...
...Ethel (Alex Kelly) barely folding herself into her closet of a bedroom or a glimpse of the apartment building’s courtyard, where rusty bikes huddle, fighting for space under a thin metal roof—or from the contrast between this and the spaciousness of the homes Vera cleans. An abiding atmosphere of tension contributes equally. Relations with Vera’s in-laws are clearly strained, and the audience’s knowledge that Vera’s friend Lily (Ruth Sheen) is using her makes the subtle drama bubble until the dramatic push toward an inevitable...
...viewer is meant to empathize viscerally with Vera against the mores and legal code of her time. Leigh expects his audience to seethe that the only option most women had then in the case of undesired pregnancy was to bring someone like Vera into their homes—to let her inflate their wombs with a solution of hot water and soap, shockingly the same procedure recommended today by the National Abortion & Reproductive Rights Action League...
...pendulous arm of justice, too, presses down on Vera Drake. By the end of the film, it is not just women as a social category who must live without freedom but Vera herself, forced to exchange liberty for captivity and the ultimate sort of crowding—that of a prison...