Vera Drake ****

Writer/Director: Mike Leigh

Year: 2004

Cinematographer: Dick Pope

Again, Mike Leigh slowly builds a character study, filling out surrounding characters, although giving a confusing and disconnected weight to story lines of a girl who is raped, and to Vera's own son... He is certainly a master of realism, and giving his actors space to fill out characters fully and honestly. And the drama of the story here builds greatly, as we see no one is intentionally doing evil, but the legal system isn't designed to be graceful or understanding, it doles out its black and white judgments even more harshly than Mrs. Drake's own son. Like her husband suggests, the world isn't so black and white as we like to think.

A tragedy of misunderstanding and accidents. I think I'm beginning to see the pattern for Mike Leigh's stories and his ideas about life. He's extremely honest, and his characters are totally human, never intended for entertainment, but for reflection on what our human experience is really like. As individuals, we are well intentioned for the most part, although we make mistakes and have misunderstandings which can result in great, damaging consequences. Maybe the greatest evils we suffer from are those actions doled out by human organizations which make set rules and fail to take into account the individuality of each specific person and situation.

A great realist filmmaker, and I greatly admire his work here... but this kind of stark human realism is hard to feel affection for, and I don't believe I'll go out of my way to see this film again unless I am studying cues for directing realism.

The next movie I saw was Billy Wilder's "The Apartment", and I must confess, I finally understand why an elevated sense of reality is more conducive to the cinematic form, offering the ability to open and close a story more cleanly, and that this form of story telling is more approachable for the audience, especially when you take the comedy and drama of life equally seriously. I'll save the praise for The Apartment for that review, but it is important to understand why I give Vera Drake 4 and not 5 stars. I'm not likely to revisit Vera Drake, although its an example of great filmmaking, although The Apartment will draw me back many times, it has moved to the number one slot on my "Must buy DVDs" list.