"Vera Drake" and the wake-up call of history.

"A YOUNGER GENERATION OF WOMEN ... BELIEVES WIRE coat hangers belong to the distant, sepia-toned past of history books and the latest Mike Leigh film."

--Katie Roiphe, Guardian (UK), November 5, 2004

WHY HAS THERE BEEN NO ideological furor over "Vera Drake" (2004)? Surely the movie is an obvious target with its sympathetic portrayal of a criminal abortionist. It was strategically released in the US during an election campaign in which the future of legal abortion was at issue and played for a litmus test.

Is it not astonishing that director Mike Leigh and star Imelda Staunton emerged as respectable spokespersons for an almost universally admired drama? The film was described by the Washington Post as "a carefully calibrated parable that quietly sneaks into your heart," (October 22, 2004) and by the New Fork Times as "Leigh's best work in a decade." (October 8, 2004) The Catholic press concurred. Referring to the "joy of watching great acting," the reviewer at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) agreed that the film is "superbly writ ten," and characterized Mike Leigh as a "master filmmaker." While "the abortion theme will be troublesome for Catholic viewers, [Leigh's] approach to the controversial subject leaves the moral judgments to the viewer," the review concluded approvingly.

Are the conservatives who so completely lionized the former Mad Max better at promotion than the liberals and feminists who might have championed "Vera Drake"? Where is the mainstream voice of the million-plus prochoice women who marched on the Mall in April? Is abortion as a subject so completely off-limits that reviewers across the board emphasized the film's artistic qualities while downplaying its content? Or is content, much less context, no longer meaningful in our postmodern world?

Are these questions too hefty for "Vera Drake" to carry?

Well, no. One of the lasting pleasures of a great film is that it carries the questions it raises--and more--with confidence. Abortion may be the lynchpin of this movie but it's only one of several themes explored. Betrayal, class, women's status, poverty, upward mobility, relations between the sexes, the nature of family life, social responsibility and the rule of law are all there, with a vengeance. So evocative is it of the 1950s that the movie also succeeds in suggesting the coming cultural explosions, such as the angry young men of British kitchen-sink drama (glimpsed in Vera's son), and a number of lasting social forces, especially feminism (the politicization of Vera's good works) and, of course, abortion law reform (about which more below). This is, of course, a towering achievement for a deceptively small film.

It has been suggested that "Vera Drake" is simply too grim to need conservative condemnation. After all, everybody has a miserable time and ends up in one of the circles of hell, so a kind of retribution has been achieved. As the USCCB reviewer put it: "The women involved are almost all desperate, and even though Vera's methods seem relatively benign, the women's fear and sorrow at what they are doing is achingly evident.... Nor, to my mind, does the film proselytize for abortion." In other words, we don't have to engage with the so called "substantive issue."

Movie critics, many of whom have been openly patronizing even as they praise the film, also appear to have no idea who Vera is or what could possibly motivate her. (Even the publicists betray her--Imelda Staunton's photograph on the poster is clearly airbrushed to make her appear younger and prettier than Vera.) Our invisibility is not news to women, and Vera herself would never expect or welcome public recognition. Vera lives, in writer Fay Weldon's remarkable phrase, "down among the women," obscured from, and oblivious to, these reviewers' self-satisfied worldview.

Well, I have an idea who Vera is. I'm a woman too, and I've known her all my life. She cleaned the upscale houses of my native Dublin, as much as those of London's Grosvenor Square, before post-colonial immigrants took over because, for the present, they're cheaper. She's waited tables in diners where we earned the princely wage of 33 cents an hour. She's lived in tenements since such public housing was first built. She's everywhere with a cup of tea, not because she's a simpleton, but because tea is a universal female language, a lingua franca of comfort. Quite simply, she is an embodiment of the cardinal virtues; a Christian heroine.

So deeply did I recognize Vera that i was immediately propelled back onto the streets of the 1970s, protesting the very systemic gender and class discrimination Vera tried to alleviate two decades previously, one soul at a time. Knowing in advance the subject matter of the film, I was nonetheless unprepared for how viscerally gripped I was by its power. Like many of my sisters, I haven't felt the passion and anger of second-wave feminism in a long time. We're very removed from when we took our politics that personally.

In my view, this remembrance is central to the film's purpose. Leigh dedicates "Vera Drake" to his parents--she a nurse, he a doctor. Thus, we are reminded that the medical profession played a central role in establishing the need for abortion law reform, and that the medical perspective is firmly written into the resulting British law.

To the distress of feminists, eligibility for legal abortion in Britain is granted by doctors on narrowly-defined medical grounds; it is not a question of personal rights. Nevertheless, for precisely this reason, access to abortion is very much more secure in Britain than it is in the US. Medically certified necessity is considerably less open to challenge than a rights-based model where each right evokes its converse: women's rights-v-fetal rights-v-privacy rights-v-parental notification rights and so on back to the backstreets--where Vera works.

So we find that, in watching this film, we are drawn inevitably back to that "substantive issue."

I cannot agree that "Vera Drake" doesn't proselytize. It seems to me that the film is hugely concerned with reforming abortion law. The villain throughout is the law itself, specifically Sections 58 and 59 of the 1861 Offenses Against the Person Act, referenced at Vera's trial, and which remain the law in Ireland.

It is this law that creates and supports the backstreets, and, irrespective of the personal kindness of some of its representatives, it is the law that destroys Vera and her family. The bleak images which close the film emphasize this point. Vera, now a felon, has been welcomed into the criminal class. Her fellow jailed abortionists, all working-class women like herself, outline a future where Vera is predestined to repeat the cycle of offense and incarceration. Her shattered family, meanwhile, has been robbed of its spirit. And this is to say nothing of the women who seek these dangerous abortions, nor of the uncomfortable medical personnel who, to a greater or lesser degree, cooperate with a law that is inimical to them. Despite the subject matter, these images are presented without hysteria. But they are presented with passion.

It is a tribute to the filmmaker that his sociopolitical agenda is so successfully woven into a powerful human tale. This is not disingenuity, but art. What it is not, however, is an alibi for missing the point.

I cannot say how any of this will read to the generation of whom Katie Roiphe writes. It's not simply that younger women have no personal experience of illegal abortion, although many must have some exposure to the extraordinary hoops through which women must now jump before availing of a much compromised constitutional right.

Part of the difficulty in alerting the young to the perils of today's neo-conservative war on women is that history, itself, including the historical argument for abortion law reform presented in "Vera Drake," is no longer part of our collective knowledge. To a generation schooled without the benefit of historical perspective or information, "Vera Drake" must seem like a broadcast from another planet. Sure, Imelda Staunton's performance is wonderful, Mike Leigh's an accomplished writer/ director; we can twitter complacently over latte about their Oscar hopes, watch for their acceptance speeches. But do we--can we--take on, even understand, their message? Can we read "Vera Drake" as the wake-up call it is clearly intended to be?

As usual in history, our very lives may depend upon it.

Irish reproductive rights activist RUTH RIDDICK is former press officer of the Cork International Film Festival and film diarist with the Irish Times. Her most recent piece for Conscience was a review of "The Passion of the Christ" (Spring 2004).

"Vera Drake" will be released on DVD in March.