Long venerated actor Maggie Smith frowned her way into today's pop culture American heart and seems quite at home. We're all hooked on her recent delivery of stodgy, strong, wittily smart, usually sort of evil characters who are also somewhat loveable, from the Harry Potter franchise to the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. Just as Downton Abbey draws to its tear-jerking conclusion on PBS, you can get one more glimpse of her familiar puckered face. Perhaps having the aristocratic Dowager Countess on the brain makes The Lady in the Van even more crushing. And you sort of favor her from the get-go.
It's as if the movie version of the long-running play by Alan Bennett was meant to bust Smith from this typecasting while still holding her regally in the place of an accomplished elder. But in reality, Smith has been an accomplished actor longer than most of our readers have been potty trained. She appeared in the stage version of the show in the late 1990s.
One can almost smell the sadness (and the nastyness) in Smith's portrayal of Mary Shepherd, or we're not sure what her real name is. At first viewers might feel like the character of Bennett (Alex Jennings) aims to bore us to death with a tired, boring depiction of the boring life of a tired writer. The slow-moving opening leaves you yearning for connection and also trying to figure out if he's got a grumpy twin or sort of schizophrenic tendencies. But as the story unfolds in his driveway, more about his own struggles with family and foundations begin to show through the cracks.
Shepherd's van lands in front of Bennett's home in north London, where she lives there in a fetid collection of plastic bags for 15 years, chasing away children, shunning music and social workers. The movie carries moments of joy and little redemptions and an in-your-face unavoidable question about what the presence of "the lady's" ilk means in our communities—how harboring and caring for those on the fringe matters, even as it reveals our ugly prejudices. And how you never, ever really know the whole story.
The Lady in the Van
Violet Crown,
PG-13,
104 min.
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