Reviewed - Vera Drake: The story of a kindly abortionist is masterfully told, says Michael Dwyer.

SINCE his début with Bleak Moments in 1971, director Mike Leigh has established himself as a remarkably astute observer of social conflict and class divisions in contemporary English life. Even when he seemed to be repeating himself in terms of themes and narratives, Leigh's films have benefited greatly from his uncanny ear for naturalistic dialogue, and from the truths and revelations arising from the adventurous improvisational process whereby he develops his screenplays in collaboration with his actors.

Vera Drake is only his second film to be set in the past, following Leigh's exuberant venture into the world of Gilbert & Sullivan for Topsy-Turvy (1999). While it shares many of the preoccupations found in his present-day films, it also allows viewers to follow his progress into another world and to become deeply involved with it.

This masterful movie is set in London in 1950, when Leigh himself was seven years old, and it precisely captures the place and the era in all its postwar austerity, rigid conservatism, black marketeering and endless cups of tea. As an evocation of this harsh, gloomy period, it is at least the equal of British cinema's most persuasive depictions of those times in Terence Davies's Distant Voices, Still Lives and Mike Newell's Dance with a Stranger, which dealt with Ruth Ellis, the last woman sentenced to the death penalty in Britain.

Leigh's fictional Vera Drake is a quiet, matronly figure - the physical opposite of the younger, vivacious and attractive Ruth Ellis. But Newell and Leigh have drawn both these "fallen women" as caring working-class mothers who naïvely and unwittingly become the architects of their own destruction.

Played with a palpable warmth and humanity by Imelda Staunton, Vera Drake verges on the saintly as she goes about her cheery daily routine of cleaning the houses of the wealthy, tending to her ailing mother, and cooking for her husband and their two grown-up children in a cramped little home.

However, Vera moonlights as a backstreet abortionist who treats her working-class clients with compassion and, ironic as it sounds in the context, maternal consideration.

Vera genuinely believes she is doing nothing wrong, just "helping young girls out when they can't manage it", as she euphemistically puts it. She doesn't take a fee for her services, although she accepts occasional black market goods from the woman (Ruth Sheen) who sets up her appointments and pockets a payment for herself without letting Vera know.

The hypocrisy of the system is emphasised when a young woman from an upper-class family is raped. Because she can afford it, the victim engages the services of a psychiatrist who goes through the charade of declaring her unstable and sets her up for an abortion in a private clinic.

Ultimately, though, Leigh's film is much less an issues-driven movie than a riveting character study of an ostensibly simple woman who deviates from the strict conformity and morality of the period.

In Leigh's inspired casting, Staunton, a richly accomplished stage actress generally relegated to supporting roles in costume movies (Shakespeare in Love, Sense and Sensibility, Much Ado About Nothing), gets the rare opportunity to move centre-screen. Her wonderfully expressive, quietly physical performance is perfect in every nuance and detail. Leigh surrounds her with an exemplary cast, many of them drawn from his earlier movies.

Vera Drake, one of the outstanding achievements of Leigh's career, carries a dedication "in loving memory of my parents, a doctor and a midwife".