Vera Drake
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Movie Reviews of Vera Drake
Movie Review: this movie is so beautiful
Summary: 5 Stars
I always thought that this movie was going to be bad and boring, but I was wrong, this one is brilliant, it's very special for it's content, Imelda makes a great performance, it's plot is very dramatic,it's so beautiful, if you are looking for good drama don't miss this one.Movie Review: A masterpiece
Summary: 5 Stars
The more I see of Mike Leigh's films the more I realize this man is the Rembrandt of the cinema. The compositions, the lighting, the pacing, the sheer humanity of his work is almost without peer in the industry.Movie Review: Nancy
Summary: 5 Stars
What a powerful movie! Superb acting! I thought about it for days after I chose it on an international flight. A real-life human drama.Movie Review: Values
Summary: 5 Stars
Great character / great acting.
A classic story, but not the American way / good / evil.
Movie Review: Great look, great feel, deceptive heart
Summary: 4 Stars
Mike Leigh has no bigger fan than I. As mentioned elsewhere, he coaxes world-class performances from every actor, no matter how important, how visible, how many lines they have. Just watch Fenella Woolgar eat up the screen in the four or five minutes she gets. Or how Eddie Marsan as Reg, a rough working man of few words, manages to capture our attention and our pity with the word "Smashing" after a difficult Christmas dinner. And Peter Wight, wonderful in other Leigh films, is spot-on here. Soft yet firm, vulnerable yet confident, he is absolutely perfect.
A glorious feature unmentioned by other reviewers is the look of this film. This is a dirty, shabby world of deprivation, few choices, and squalor, a country suffering from post-war shortages and a clear lack of paint. Every scene feels as if we are intruding, thrust into a world far away and yet right here; we never feel as if we are merely watching. Leigh's films always look good; this is no exception.
And yet, I was disappointed by Vera Drake. Sure, Vera is a wonderful lady, touchingly drawn. Sure the morality is played as complex. But for some of us, it isn't as complex as that. I'm afraid I'm with Sid on this, who can forgive his mum without accepting or approving of the horror of her calling. It is not Sid, but Vera, who chooses to see the world in black and white. There can be nothing wrong with what she does; she is, and always has been, a helper. She even refuses to acknowledge that she performs abortions, "That's your word for it." No Vera, that is THE word for it. With the events in Florida, we see how people use words to justify and mean whatever they want them to. Kill to help. Girls in trouble....A few years ago a really bad movie called "If These Walls Could Talk" used that kind of manipulative bombastic overblown propaganda to create the kind of extreme circumstances abortion supporters love to believe are the norm rather than the exception. Mike Leigh is far above such tripe, but he skirts dangerously close to it. If we didn't have the tidy abortion of the upper class girl, whose mother refuses to even acknowledge Vera at the end of the film ("Oh the hypocrite, if she only knew!") the tale might be more ambivalent. But though Vera is hardly the saintly character she likes to imagine herself, I think the message is leadenly clear.
And I too found Vera's breakdown at the end a tad tiresome. Yes, she sobs, or cries, or whimpers, or represses all of the above, but the film's action comes to an abrupt halt, as the conflict and implied meanings conclude. Too much close up, too slow, and I didn't really care. I wasn't convinced. Worth viewing, beautifully done, but not as compelling as its fans wish it was. They live in a world where they must have issues like this be complex; but if you think they're not, then the whole argument is rather lame. Lots of people do evil thinking they are doing good. Vera is one of them. And you negative voters, fire away. Though is it reasonable to say a review isn't helpful if you hate my politics rather than my writing?