Always approaching his characters with the utmost appreciation for life, it comes as no surprise that Mike Leigh has come to investigate directly the subject of abortion in his latest film, Vera Drake. As with other Leigh projects, it would be unfair to label Vera Drake as a mere issue film. It would also be misleading to assume, however, that Leigh constructs Drake with the same concerns and process as all his other films. Leigh, known for creating his films solely through improvisation, continues to evolve; he doesn't always have to do things the same way. Drake contains the seeds of humanity that pervade all of Leigh's work, but also poses new challenges to the viewer and the artist in harnessing the forms of period drama to breathe new life into the way a film is constructed. Vera Drake tells the story of the title character (played by Imelda Staunton, Bright Young Things), a busy family matron and caretaker, who is the glue of her dynamic family in post-World War II London. Her husband, Stan (Phil Davis, High Hopes) owns an auto-repair shop with his brother. Their son Sid (Daniel Mays, All or Nothing) is an on-the-rise and petulant tailor who challenges the family with questions about success and the society. Their semi-autistic daughter (Alex Kelly, All or Nothing) stays at home and is introduced to an equally nervous fellow (Eddie Marsan, 21 Grams) to whom she ultimately becomes engaged. The family is jovial and diverse, showing Leigh's aptitude for matching actors with a wide range of abilities. Showing the viewer the fragility of family and society in the wake of the war, Leigh has Vera's family exhibit both the profound sense of community and the self-protective repression that dotted post-war Britain. Vera fills the diverse roles which many women of her day found themselves committed: housewife, neighborly caretaker, domestic servant, factory worker and all-around chameleon of the public sphere. What she keeps to herself, though, are the covert miscarriages she induces for poor, working-class women who have nowhere to turn and are unable to support a child. Unaware of the legal repercussions of her clandestine social work, Vera meets up with the law of the rigid moral world in which she lives.

Leigh makes sure to construct a thoroughly detailed milieu for the discussion of the issue. Offering no concrete moral judgments, he allows the reader to draw conclusions from the perspectives he shows for sober consideration. He doesn't only restrict his view to bleeding sympathy for poor, neglected women who seek abortions from Vera, but he also shows the significantly better opportunities for medical care and covert advice available to wealthy citizens.

The lushness of Drake's world marks Leigh's second foray into costume drama, the first having been the very successful Topsy-Turvy (1999). This was a drastic departure from Leigh's method, as all of his previous films relied on the present. Leigh now uses historical constraints to structure the world of his creation. He describes this dilemma as one of subversion, trying to infuse the expectations of historical drama with new life and urgency. Leigh likely approached Drake with similar aspirations, but with less of a conscious effort to deconstruct and subvert. Rather, he highlights the forms of drama, to give a new angle for which to have historical perspective.

Drake is in no way superior to Leigh's early work, which relied on looseness, humor and improvisation, with concerns for the use of form and additional facets of imagination. Drake is distinctly less mysterious and therefore less imaginative than many of Leigh's other works. Its expressionistic agenda falls in line with other recent Leigh films, which are distinctly more sterile and less unraveled than before. This film, while multi-faceted in its presentation, is still more digested and telling than any of his other works.