In this movie about a kind working class woman in 1950’s Britain, who’s helping hand to others includes cups of tea, matchmaking and illegal abortions, Mike Leigh asks a lot of his viewer. Mind you, it’s completely worth it. This movie will make you come out of the cinema feeling angry, compassionate and upset in all the right places, but only if you are prepared to open your heart and mind and take some amount of pain and discomfort to get there.

Leigh, who also wrote this movie, starts you off gently. Through plenty of wide-shots, he paints a picture of 1950’s Britain. It is as if you are looking at a photo-album of that era. We see Vera pottering about in the flat of a sick neighbour, taking care of her own family, cleaning for the upper-class, inviting the lonely bachelor in for dinner. She seems to be always putting the kettle on and humming contentedly. Leigh makes us feel the warmth of that life, despite its obvious hardship. It contrasts greatly with the places Vera works, the cold way the mother of one of those families approaches her daughter. The emptiness of their materially rich lives clashes with Vera’s joy, warmth and kindness.

Leigh then eases us into Vera’s other activity where she helps women who are “in the family way” and who can’t afford the costly legal termination of their pregnancy which (as one of the subplots shows) is only available to the rich and influential. Mind you, Vera does not charge for anything and one can only hope that the women in the posh private clinics will be handled with as much care and compassion as Vera approaches her “patients”. Inevitably however, one of these girls nearly dies from the procedure and the police show up on the Drake-family doorstep to arrest Vera.

This is where Leigh changes gear. He starts dishing out one relentless close-up after the other, pressing your face into Vera’s demise like a school bully would push his victims face into the playground. We see the Vera we know disappear and her life and family with it, and it is almost unbearable to watch. The only reprieve in the movie, that came from a tender little subplot where Vera’s shy daughter and lonely neighbour very carefully and very quietly fall in love, is also taken away from us for now that this man is welcomed in Vera’s family he becomes part of the tragedy. And in the two final scenes, Leigh adds insult to injury as he shows us not only what becomes of Vera, but of her family as well. One of the final shots is like a photograph again, but it is like a sick parody of the happy family pictures we saw before.

The heart of this movie, in every way, is Imelda Staunton who makes you care deeply about Vera. We see a woman who, in her own simple way, makes a difference in the lives of others and who takes pride and meaning from doing so. Staunton is completely un-vain as she lets Vera disappear before our eyes. The broken woman we see at the end of the movie is at least 4 inches shorter than the vibrant busybody she makes us love in the beginning of it. Her ruin is painful to witness. Not just for us, it seems, but also for an excellent supporting cast, who are as helpless as the viewer to stop what is happening to Vera. Her husband, who disagrees with what’s she’s done, but still stands by her, her son who is angry and upset and can afford this point of view precisely because his mother raised him so well, the police officers who are clearly reluctant to do what they are doing but, like Vera, have no way out. And then there’s the upper-class: the people she works for, the male magistrate, who from their places of safety and comfort can afford to turn their heads and judge her.

All of it is excruciatingly beautiful to watch. At some point I just wanted to scream at the screen: “No more, make it stop, please make her stop crying!”

The film is full of social comment, as always with Mike Leigh. But he does not force his opinion down our throats. Despite the dicey subject matter, ultimately what he inspires here is not a discussion on whether abortion should or should not be legal. What he does is make you aware of the fact that different rules are (still) applied to the rich and poor, to men and women, and that it will always be the wrong people who benefit and suffer because of this. And he does it through one wild cinematic ride.

So go and see this movie. I dare you.