The Lady in the Van

 The Lady in the Van is a 2015 film directed by Nicholas Hytner adapting a memoir by the celebrated British playwright, Alan Bennett.  The story, said to be mostly true, concerns a homeless woman who parked the van in which she was dwelling outside of Bennett's flat in Camden Village, a part of London.  The woman told Bennett that she intended to stay near his driveway for three months -- in fact, she lived by his home, in three different iterations of the van, for 15 years up to the date of her death in 1989.  Bennett first wrote an essay about the experience that he, later, expanded into a short book.  Then, he devised a monologue on the subject that was premiered in 1990 and, then, performed on BBC radio as a play in 1999.  The lady in the van, named Mary or Margaret Shepherd was played by Maggie Smith, the celebrated British actress who died on September 27, 2024 at the age of 89.  Smith was famous for her performances in the BBC show Downton Abbey as well as work she did in the Harry Potter films among many other iconic roles.  Smith looks terrible in the movie; her face is gray and she seems emaciated, traipsing about in shapeless filthy clothing.  The script begins with a oratorical cadenza about her bad odor -- she is said to smell like "the inside of an ear" and many other worse things.  A couple shots show excrement attributed to the character and she is said to defecate in a plastic bags that surround her reeking, noisome van.  At one point, Bennett, who is a character in the movie, reproaches himself for paying so much attention to Ms. Shepherd's shit -- a cynical version of himself says that this is because he is "caring" for the elderly female vagrant.  "Caring is all about shit," Bennett tells us.  Smith's performance is uncompromising, the kind of work for which elderly actors are acclaimed for being "brave", and Smith isn't afraid to appear in the worst possible light in this film.  Of course, as a young woman, she was one of Britain's greatest beauties and, so, the film is dispiriting in some respects -- but she imparts a fierce dignity to a character that most of us would turn away from in disgust if we met her on the street.  

The Lady in the Van is highly literate and intelligent.  The script is well-crafted and effective.  The subject matter is slender, however, and the story is tricked-out with some distressing twists and turns; to pad the material into a feature-length movie, Bennett turns the story into an account of his personal struggles as a closeted homosexual man, a lonely and isolated writer, and a devoted son caring for his own mother (who is suffering from senile dementia) in a plot that is posited as parallel to the story about Margaret (or Mary) Shepherd.  Writers, Bennet notes, are in dialogue with themselves -- they talk to themselves and, indeed, what is written on the page is the product of an interior conversation.  Bennett dramatizes this concept by dividing his character into two persons, both, more or less, identical although one is more formally dressed than the other.  Bennett says that one of the versions of himself is the person who has to live his life; the other version is Bennett as writer, an unscrupulous fellow who will use Ms. Shepherd's poverty and mental illness as fodder for his writing.  (The conceit is a little like several pictures involving Truman Capote including the TV show, The Swans and the film Capote.)  The double Bennett's allow the playwright to dramatize his reactions to the vagrant and provide brittle, witty and aphoristic dialogue about the woman -- it's a pretty clever concept and, for the most part, works well.  Mary Shepherd is on the lam -- she believes that she killed a bicyclist in a hit-and-run accident twenty years earlier.  A corrupt cop blackmails her -- this part of the movie seems weirdly obtuse:  is the cop supposed to be a villain and, if so, why is he portrayed so warmly (by the great Jim Broadbent)?  As the film progresses, Bennett provides further information about the homeless woman -- she turns out to have been once an accomplished pianist (she performed at the Proms), a former nun, and an ambulance driver in "blacked-out Kensington during the war."  The people in Camden Village, a very upscale neighborhood (the widow of Ralph Vaughn Williams, the great composer, lives there) are surprisingly accommodating to her and, throughout the movie, everyone behaves with British civility and equanimity.  The only villains in the picture are members of the Catholic Church -- apparently, Shepherd liked playing the piano more than praying when she was a novice nun and, as a result, her vow of obedience included a promise to never play the piano again.  (Toward the very end of the movie, just before her death, Shepherd pays some Chopin on a piano in a care center.)  Bennett contrives the film to depict his clashes with the obdurate, bullying and filthy Shepherd in the context of his own mother's decline -- his mother becomes comatose as the film progresses.  Ultimately, when Shepherd dies, her evil spirit hovering over Bennett is exorcized.  The gay man ends up with a loving partner and the movie has a happy ending the celebrates Alan Bennett becoming well-adjusted at the end of his own life. (Bennett, I should note, is still alive and, often, publishes diary entries in The London Review of Books).  This material is obviously deeply significant to Bennett as witness his extensive engagement with the subject but it's not immediate apparent as to what the movie is supposed to mean.  We see Bennett apparently hiring "rent-boys" throughout the movie -- Shepherd, to whom the concept of homosexuality seems alien, accuses the handsome young men of being "communists."  At the end of the film, Bennett has integrated himself into one figure; he no longer bickers with himself and, in fact, doesn't need to because he has a romantic partner living with him.  

The movie features an excellent cast of BBC character actors.  The picture is effectively filmed.  The whole show is conceived as a struggle against the sentiment that is inherent in the film's conception -- a wacky, eccentric homeless lady teaches a Gay man how to live with bravery and stand in  his own Truth.  To avoid the picture descending into bathos, Bennett and Hytner engineer several gruesome and jarring shocks -- there's a big close-up of human feces stuck on a garbage can and the scene in which Mary Shepherd accidentally kills the bicyclist is gory, with a big gout of blood disfiguring the front of the van.  Clearly Bennett loves this material so much that he can't let go of it -- the movie has three or four endings one after another, including Ms. Shepherd's ascent into heaven, and, in the last scene, we see the real Bennett participating with the movie crew in making the picture.  It's a charming, beautifully written, and inconsequential movie.