There is an old novelistic axiom that character generates plot, which means that it is who people are that determines what happens to them. This is probably originally a 19th-century idea, and it may still work in novels (other than those by the likes of John Grisham) but it seldom applies to movies nowadays. The Hollywood formula subordinates character to plot — plot determines character. In a mainstream Hollywood movie, ‘the hero”, for instance, is not a character —it’s a position in a plot.
British director Mike Leigh goes against the plot-driven grain, and he goes all the way. In a rather old-fashioned, theatrical and democratic-lefty sort of way, he provides a framework and then gets his actors to research and create their own characters. Only after they have done so, and have begun to interact with the other characters in the story, does Leigh go off and develop a script around them.
This process, naturally, gives a strong realistic flavour to Leigh’s movies. The characters have a lived-in feeling, and the actors perform with a sense of deep conviction. One may be tempted to recycle Laurence Olivier’s famous question to Dustin Hoffman, on the set of Marathon Man, when Hoffman had put himself through all sorts of Method-style traumas so he could look appropriately exhausted and traumatised for the cameras. My boy, said Olivier, why not try acting?
But that’s precisely what Leigh’s actors are doing in his movies. This is acting of the most inward kind, subtle performances that come from within — and it pays off. Add that to sets and locations that meticulously recreate the specific period of the movie, and you have a better-than- documentary realism that is deeply affecting for the viewer.
Leigh does all this once again in Vera Drake, a movie named after its protagonist. She may sound rather like one of those 1940s femmes fatales, but she is an ordinary working-class woman in 1950s Britain —one who performs abortions. Of course, abortions were illegal then, and the source of much social anxiety. Leigh contrasts what Vera does with the options open to women who were a bit better-off, and prepared to lie. He also explores both Vera’s motivations and the reactions of those around her, by letting them emerge in the course of the tale. The result is a rounded, full, detailed picture of a person, a time, a place, a situation.
On the surface, Vera Drake doesn’t promise an uplifting experience for the moviegoer. In this 1950s Britain everything seems mud-coloured, and it always seems to be twilight. Yet, remarkably, Leigh is able to do bleak — then transcend it. With Imelda Staunton and the rest of the cast doing a wonderful job, Vera Drake makes for a touching, sometimes funny, and in the end strangely satisfying movie. Strangely? Perhaps it is just the rare cinematic encounter with what feel like real people in a real world.