Motherly abortionist entangled

In Vera Drake, a new film from the English director Mike Leigh about a back-street abortionist, the moment invariably comes when the title character asks her client to bring her some boiling water.

Vera's affect is so cozy, as nurturing as a maternal bosom, that it's always somewhat of a surprise when you remember that the water isn't for a warming cup of tea, but for the solution she dispenses. That's very much to Leigh's point, since Vera wants nothing so much as to support the frightened, the dismayed and the impoverished who seek her help, who come to this tender dumpling of a woman because they believe they have no other choice.

Set in London in 1950, when abortion in England still existed in a legal gray zone, Vera Drake is Leigh's best work in a decade. Since the release of his splenetic masterpiece Naked in 1993, Leigh has directed four features, the best being Topsy-Turvy, a spiky entertainment about the songwriting team Gilbert and Sullivan.

If the three other features -- Secrets and Lies, Career Girls and the dolorous All or Nothing, an exercise in miserablism verging on self-parody -- were less successful, it is because, like his filmmaking compatriot Ken Loach, Leigh sometimes betrays his art for some political finger-wagging. That the two filmmakers are, of course, often just preaching to the adoring, approving choir makes such grandstanding especially tedious.

There's no such tedium in Vera Drake, which carries the moving dedication, "In loving memory of my parents, a doctor and a midwife," and is suffused with humanity rather than dogma.

In Vera Drake, the politics of abortion isn't a position that individuals can take and leave at will. It's what drives women underground to someone like Vera, with her clucks and smiles, her bar of lye and all that hot water. In this sense, the film's political message isn't really a message, a communique from the filmmaker to his audience (though it's clear where Leigh stands); it's an argument, as much moral as political, that emerges from the characters' real-to-life experiences. That makes Vera Drake ring honest, but what makes it ring true is that it's directed with love and beauty.

The story opens with Vera (Imelda Staunton) bustling from one grimy corner of London to another. She is happily married to a mechanic, Stan (Phil Davis), and is mother to Sid (Daniel Mays), a cheery tailor, and Ethel (Alex Kelly), a classic Mike Leigh creation hunched over with inarticulate shyness.

When she's not tending to her family, Vera helps sick neighbors and collects neighborhood strays, like the mournful bachelor Reg (Eddie Marsan), whom she tucks into her care. She also works cleaning houses populated by bored wives and pampered daughters who are little more than extensions of the lavish furnishings. It's in one such mausoleum that Leigh casts a sympathetic eye at Susan (Sally Hawkins), a young woman whose class privilege can't protect her from rape.

Leigh's screenplay brings Vera and Susan's lives together, though not in the manner you initially expect. Like parallel lines that never converge, Susan seeks an abortion through the bureaucratic medical system while Vera goes about her daily bustling, humming little tunes, calling everyone "dear" as if she were blowing kisses and occasionally trudging into some anonymous building to meet a distraught, fearful or aloof stranger.