Movie Review
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THE LADY IN THE VAN
Directed by Nicholas Hytner. Written by Alan Bennett. Starring Maggie Smith, Alex Jennings. At Kendall Square, West Newton. 103 minutes. PG-13 (a brief unsettling image).
Recently, I showed a group of theater students some clips from Maggie Smith’s 1969 Oscar-winning breakthrough as the fanatical girls’ schoolteacher in “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.’’ The movie has dated but Smith’s performance most certainly has not, and the students’ little jaws hit the floor. This was their beloved Professor McGonagall, with whom they had grown up in seven “Harry Potter’’ movies? It was like finding your grandmother at a rave.
This may sound odd, but I think we take Smith for granted. Now 81, the actress is more with us than ever, of course, and she has become an award-winning crowd-pleaser as the vinegar-lipped dowager countess on TV’s “Downton Abbey’’ and as a crank with a heart of mush in the “Best Exotic Marigold Hotel’’ movies. Cozy comfort, both roles. But does she get to play British queens or ennobled heroines? Does she get rubber-stamped for Oscars whenever she appears? No, she’s too busy working. Yet in a cage match with Judi Dench or Helen Mirren, only a fool would bet against Dame Maggie.
Which brings us to “The Lady in the Van,’’ in which Smith is once again very, very good in a very different way than you’d expect. The film is based on actual events in the life of British writer-personality Alan Bennett that he turned into a book in 1989, a play in 1999, and now a film directed by Nicholas Hytner. You might call this beating a dead horse. The English call it thrift.
Actor Alex Jennings plays Bennett, who, when the movie opens, is moving into a new home in the bustling Camden neighborhood of London. It’s the 1970s, and Bennett is a shy, dry, witty sort as well known for appearing onstage with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore in “Beyond the Fringe’’ as for the plays he cranks out for the stage and telly.
Smith is “Miss Shepherd,’’ and she’s what you and I would call a bag lady in our callower moments. Living out of a dilapidated van that she periodically paints a blinding shade of yellow, Miss Shepherd has an air of frayed gentility regularly punctuated by paranoid conspiracy theories and schizophrenic rants. She can be powerfully rude, but Smith shows us the fear that drives the woman, and the moments of daft humor and grace. Miss Shepherd — her name turns out to be Mary, and then, eventually, something else entirely — is the albatross of the block, and the neighbors, both kind-hearted and irritable, dread her parking the van, long-term, in front of their houses.
Kind and passive-aggressive soul that he is, Bennett at one point allowed Miss Shepherd to pull the van into his driveway. And there she remained. For 15 years.
“The Lady in the Van’’ is about a number of things, mostly about what we owe other people and ourselves. It’s hardly a lecture — more a reminder of how well and how messily our good intentions play out. Miss Shepherd provides a sort of litmus test for everyone on the block. One middle-age couple (Roger Allam and Deborah Findlay) make no bones about their desire for her to go away. A young mother (Pandora Colin) uses the old lady as a lesson in kindness for her children, but that’s about it. The fine actress Frances de la Tour plays a local grand dame who turns out to be the widow of composer Ralph Vaughan Williams and who regards Bennett’s exasperated caring for and curiosity toward Miss Shepherd as the workings of a saint.
Bennett, who shows more interest in Miss Shepherd than he does in his own mother (Gwen Taylor) fading away in a home up north, would argue with that. In fact, he does argue with that: “The Lady in the Van’’ splits his character visually in two, with the writing Alan Bennett, the one in his own head, commenting sardonically on the guilt-ridden (in)actions of the Alan Bennett who has to live out there in the real world. It’s a cute, stagey gimmick that wears out its welcome and that might have been better conveyed by more cinematic means.
But this is a playwright’s movie, and Hytner is the director for it, having already filmed Bennett’s “The Madness of George III’’ (retitled “The Madness of King George’’ for sequel-addled America) in 1994 and “The History Boys’’ in 2006. Fans of the latter will get a small kick out of the cameos in “The Lady in the Van’’ by many of the original History Boys of stage and film, including Dominic Cooper and James Corden. Toward the very end, Bennett himself wanders into the frame for a look-see.
All that will go over the head of American audiences, unless they’re serious Anglophiles, and for them Smith will be the reason to see the movie. She repays our interest with the honesty and fraught care with which she embodies her character, about whom we learn more as Bennett’s curiosity gets the better of him. Miss Shepherd is a crazed and imperious woman, a damaged creature who evokes in us pity and annoyance and sympathy and finally sadness at the ways in which lives get warped. Smith never plays her false — not once does she make the character cuddly or an object lesson to the saner, settled people around her.
“The Lady in the Van’’ ultimately presents a number of facts that would seem to “solve’’ Mary Shepherd. I’d like to think Smith knows better than that. In her hands, the lady in the van remains complex and unknowable — a mystery to the end. And that, friends, is acting.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @tyburr.
