Starring: Maggie Smith and Alex Jennings, Jim Broadbent, Frances de la Tour, and Roger Allam
Distributor: Sony Pictures
Runtime: 104 mins. Reviewed in Feb 2016
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This British drama-comedy is written by Alan Bennett, and is based “almost truthfully” on his actual association with Mary Shepherd, who was an elderly, homeless woman who entered his life in the 1970s. Bennett allowed Miss Shepherd to park her van temporarily in the driveway of his home in Camden Town, London, for three months, but her van stayed there, with her in it, for 15 years.
This is a classic Bennett story that has achieved London playhouse fame. Maggie Smith has played Miss Shepherd before, including in the original London production. Some sixteen years later, she takes the role of Miss Shepherd in this film, and was nominated as Best Actress for her performance in the 2015 Golden Globe Awards.
Mary Shepherd is, in fact, Margaret Fairchild, who is now deceased. She was a talented pianist, tried to become a nun, and was committed to a mental institution by her brother. Escaping from the institution, the van she was driving hit a motorcyclist and she believed mistakenly that she was responsible for his death. Thereafter, she lived in perpetual fear of being arrested by the Police, and sought to hide in Alan Bennett’s drive-way for one and a half decades. The full details of Miss Shepherd’s actual past was only made known to Bennett after she died.
Maggie Smith delivers a wonderful performance as Miss M.T. Shepherd and she projects her trademark irritability, caustic tongue, and lack of graciousness in just the right way. She won Australian audiences over completely with the same traits in her stage performance in Australia of “Bed Among the Lentils”, another of Bennett’s famous short stories, in which Smith played an alcoholic wife of a Anglican vicar, who was having an illicit affair with an Indian green-grocer.
As Shepherd, Smith’s dramatic timing is superb. She asserts her God-given right to exist in the way that she chooses, claiming she receives “guidance from the Virgin Mary”; she completely lacks any semblance of personal hygiene; and she dresses in extraordinary second-hand clothes. The movie shows that the situation enormously frustrated Bennett (played soberly by Alex Jennings in the film), but with time he formed an unexpected bond of friendship with the woman who entered his life so unexpectedly.
Shepherd was the kind of person who put “Holy Water” in her van to make it go better, and she engaged often in outlandish behaviour that moved Bennett to “thoughts of strangulation”. The movie tells us that Bennett came to respect what he described as Miss Shepherd’s “vagabond nobility”, but Shepherd supplied Bennett unintentionally with endless comic material. Frequently, Bennett came to Shepherd’s defence in his gentrified middle-class neighbourhood, but the words “thank you” were never said by Shepherd. Jennings and Smith capture the situation very well.
Maggie Smith gives an especially telling performance that alerts one instantly to Mary Shepherd’s tragic anguish, and she captures precisely the sadness and loneliness associated with Shepherd’s unhappy past. Shepherd is such a strong character, though, the film misses out a little on what exactly changed Bennett in his attitude towards her, and Alex Jennings’ constant look of repressed reserve has a hard time getting above the tour-de-force of Smith’s acting performance. Almost against the odds of what happens, however, Smith and Jennings project plausibly two very different people who finally come to mutually understand each other.
This is a film than that teaches the value of compassion and the virtue of reaching out to strangers in need, no matter how odd they might appear to be. It is basically a sad movie with a touch of whimsy to it about an unforgettable, eccentric character, who is also a loveable nuisance.
Under Nicholas Hytner’s warm-hearted and gentle direction, Bennett’s inspired writing, and Smith’s bravura acting, this quietly compelling movie is very enjoyable and entertaining.
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