Vera Drake, the eponymous heroine of Mike Leigh’s new movie, is nobody’s idea of an arresting physical presence. As played by Imelda Staunton, a powerful actress mutated into a mousy housewife, she’s someone you’d barely register if you passed her on the street. Up close, though, she’s very like my mother’s account of my grandmother—congenitally cheery, forever taking in last-minute strays for dinner, always ready with that most potent of English therapies, a nice cup of tea. Vera cleans rich women’s houses for a living, but she also has a secret sideline “helping young girls out,” as she puts it. Not to put too fine a point on it, Vera is a back-street abortionist—a pejorative term that, in this case at least, would make Leigh shudder—with only a tenuous grasp of medical hygiene. But because she does her work for free, and because she’s such a nice person, Leigh offers her to us as a misunderstood martyr and a casualty of the stringent laws banning abortion in England in 1950. I’m still trying to understand why I came out unmoved by a movie as capably acted, gorgeously mounted and expertly directed as this one is.

Set in a down-at-heel borough of North London, Vera Drake beautifully captures the volatile post-war mood of scarcity, hope and ambition through the Drake family, whose drab home is warmed by domestic happiness. Vera’s mellow husband, Stan (played by Phil Davis, who was the scruffy lead in Leigh’s wonderful 1988 film, High Hopes), works as a mechanic in the garage of his brother Frank (Adrian Scarborough). The Drakes have two grown children living at home, Ethel (Alex Kenny), a lumpish, painfully shy young woman who works in a light-bulb factory and is courted by an equally monosyllabic neighbor (the excellent Eddie Marsan), and Sid (Daniel Mays), a tailor’s assistant who, with his slicked hair and on-the-make verve, presents the sharp face of a new generation of enterprising workers on their way up from poverty. The Drakes hover around caricature, and none more so than Vera herself, who oozes an unalloyed goodness of soul that strains credibility and, eventually, patience.

VERA DRAKE  ( * * 1/2)
Directed by Mike Leigh
Starring Imelda Staunton, Phil Davis, Adrian Scarborough, Alex Kenny, Daniel Mays, Ruth Sheen.
(Rated R, 135 mins.)

And then there’s Vera’s other little job, terminating the pregnancies of exhausted Catholic mothers of seven, or those of naïve girls knocked up in quickies with married men. The compassionate Vera won’t accept a penny for her work, and, if you can believe it, she has no idea that Lily (High Hopes’ Ruth Sheen), the middleman who brokers her clients, profits handsomely from the arrangement. Armed with a grater, a bar of soap and a rubber-hose syringe wrapped in a worn cloth, Vera makes house calls, delicately asking her clients to “go all floppy for me” as she begins the procedure. Her charitable sideline is a train wreck waiting to happen, and when one of her “young ladies” ends up in the hospital, it’s only a matter of time before the police come knocking on her door in the middle of a family celebration.

Vera Drake’s script, written as always by Leigh, is bafflingly lacking in the vernacular cockney wit and cadences that gave Life Is Sweet its special sparkle. As to Vera, it’s not hard to imagine her doing what she did for free. What strains credibility is that a woman of Vera’s intelligence and compassion would be unaware that using non-sterilized instruments is dangerous, or that the unscrupulous Lily was cashing in on her kindness. The real tragedy of criminalizing abortion was not that it created inadvertent, improbable public-health hazards like Vera, but that it allowed the Lilys of this world to crawl out of the woodwork.