Areligious cross-section

THERE ARE TIMES when excellence is not enough. Consider Mike Leigh's eagerly anticipated drama Vera Drake, which plays the New York Film Festival October 8 and 9, and opens for a regular run October 10. Set in post-World War II London, it's beautifully photographed, confidently directed and full of characteristically superb, naturalistic acting. But it's a fundamentally dishonest movie.

The problem is Leigh's disingenuous approach toward his subject matter. The title character, a kindly maid played by Imelda Staunton, is a devoted wife to her mechanic husband, Stan (Phil Davis) and a good mother to her two adult children, the brash tailor Sid (Daniel Mays) and the nervous wallflower Ethel (Alex Kelly). She also happens to perform abortions for women she meets through her childhood friend Lily (Ruth Sheen), a tough bird who deals in black-market goods.

Leigh's subject is a woman's right to control her own biological destiny, and the terrible consequences that occur when the state conspires to deny that right. To his credit, he doesn't present abortion as an act that occurs in no particular context and has no particular consequences. He treats it as a timeless and unavoidable part of life-a basic fact of civilization that has always been with us and always will be, and which, contrary to pro-life rhetorical distortions, is never undertaken lightly, even by women who do it for what are arguably bad reasons.

As Leigh hopscotches around the family's circle of relatives and friends, we see Vera visiting the women's homes, gently instructing them to take off their knickers and lie back while she improvises a solution to their problem. The women are all fearful and desperate, even when they pretend otherwise. One woman is a rape victim, another a poor Caribbean immigrant, another an outwardly liberated middle-class wife whose life is clearly more privileged than the working class Vera's. Leigh goes out of his way to present a cross section of London society and a cross section of female experience, which suggests at first that he's adopting the mindset of a dramatist rather than a propagandist.

I don't buy it. There's a void in the middle of Leigh's drama: faith. It seems inconceivable that none of Leigh's working-class and middle-class Anglo characters would ever be shown going to church, praying, reading the Bible or having any discussions even tangentially related to God. Bear in mind I'm not coming at this from a conservative or even especially religious viewpoint. I'm staunchly pro-choice and in favor of Roe v. Wade, and while I was raised in a family of Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons, I'm not a churchgoer and have no rooting interest in organized religion of any kind. But I do believe that a serious artist should not engage in a dramatic presentation of abortion-arguably the most divisive social issue of our time-while virtually ignoring a key source of that division. (The only hint of God in Vera Drake is Andrew Dickson's score, which employs a heavenly choir; but the choir seems more a chorus certifying Vera's essential decency than a signifier of some higher power.)

I appreciated how Leigh contrasts the illegality of abortion in postwar London against the war experiences of the men in Vera's story, including her husband, her son and her daughter's lumpy but decent suitor, Reg (Eddie Marsan). There is indeed irony in the notion that a state would deny a woman the right to abort a child on moral grounds even as it feels free to draft soldiers and sanction them to go overseas and kill strangers. (An early scene where the men sit around the Drake household, casually but gravely discussing their horrific war experience, injects a welcome dose of reality into our era of televised, sanitized war.) Leigh also notes another irony: It was possible during this era to get state permission to abort if one swore that mental illness ran in the family-which meant that to Her Majesty's government, abortion was only unacceptable if the fetus was a potential taxpayer.

But all these matters seem tangential compared to matters of faith. One can argue that abortion is a value-neutral medical procedure, no worse than removing a tumor when performed early. One can also argue that it's a terrible act that should still be legal because making it illegal creates greater social ills (many of which Leigh vividly explores in Vera Drake). And one can argue that abortion is simply immoral or wrong (a position that requires no religious feeling) or that it's a grave sin (which does imply faith). But one cannot depict the life of a woman who performs abortions without in some way acknowledging all three positions. That Vera Drake engages with the first two and not the third is the wellspring of a dishonesty that poisons everything that's good about the movie.

SCIENTISTS AND FILMMAKERS will love Primer, a microbudget science fiction thriller that achieves two rare distinctions. First, it's not about mad scientists, but scientists, period, and it takes scientific theories seriously and asks that the viewer try to understand them, rather than treating them as gobbledygook to be spouted between monster attacks. Second, the film articulates its ideas in such a low-key, effective way that it's hard to imagine how a bigger budget would have improved it.

Primer is the debut feature by Dallas filmmaker Shane Carruth, who wrote, directed, edited, scored and costarred in the movie. In an unnamed suburban wasteland of ranch-style starter homes, office parks and storage depots, Primer introduces us to four young scientists who work punishing hours for big corporations but spend their rare off-time in a garage tinkering with an experimental machine. The hero, Aaron (Carruth) and his best friend Abe (David Sullivan) hit on a series of small discoveries that lead them to split off from their partners and create a device that seems to be a time machine or a dimensional portal (or both, or neither). I'd rather not get specific in this review because I don't want to ruin any surprises. Suffice it to say that if you've ever fantasized about cloning yourself for a day or starting the day over at an earlier hour, this device might be of some help.

There are implications and complications to this technology, and Primer distinguishes itself from most sci-fi movies by exploring them with the cool obsessiveness of a mathematician attacking a hellacious equation in an all-night chalkboard marathon. (It would go nicely on a double bill with Suture, La Jetee or Lost Highway, all of which could have been written by stoned physics or philosophy students.)

If Carruth's film has a cautionary message, it likely has something to do with the uncertainty principle or the doctrine of unintended consequences (perhaps both). Yet Primer isn't one of those anti-rational films in the "There are some things man was not meant to know" vein-the preferred sci-fi/horror mode ever since Mary Shelley penned Frankenstein. Carruth, a mathematician and engineer, seems more interested in the notion that any new technology, once invented, is certain to be used and abused. The abuse doesn't mean science is evil; it just means humans are flawed.

Primer is not a great movie, or even a great first movie. Some of the editing is affected and arty, and although I like oblique films that refuse to explain themselves, parts of Carruth's movie still taxed my patience. There were at least five seemingly important moments where I had no clue what was going on. That would have been okay if Carruth had caught me up in the next scene or two, but he didn't. (Or am I just slow?)

On the other hand, first films don't have to be perfect; they just have to show talent, and Primer demonstrates as distinctive a sensibility as any first film I've seen. Like Spielberg's early pictures and Ridley Scott's Alien, Primer insists that its characters talk in relaxed conversational tones and interrupt and overlap each other just like real people, which makes the script's bizarre situations seem more credible. Just as important, Carruth proves he has disciplined eyes and ears-a goal rarely achieved by microbudget indie filmmakers. Primer has a big, clean, often unsettling sound design, full of Kubrickian air-whooshes and David Lynchian machine noises, and the camerawork-which alternates nervous handheld closeups with static, painterly wide shots, many of which use doors and windows to create black-matted frames within frames-suggests great confidence. (Something about the movie's vibe reminded me of Alan J. Pakula's 1974 thriller The Parallax View-the greatest, least appreciated paranoid film of the 70s.) Like the Coen brothers' Blood Simple, Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It and Steven Soderbergh's Sex, Lies and Videotape, Primer is an engaging, ragged-around-the-edges debut that's equally interesting for what it does and for what it promises. o