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Almost all of the characters in the work of master filmmaker Mike Leigh eventually win us over, despite the pronounced quirks and obnoxious behavior they exhibit. But with Vera Drake, a small but effective period piece, Leigh has quietly given us one of his most straightforwardly likable characters. The titular heroine, a diminutive, mild-mannered matriarch of a tightly knit working class family in 1950s London, has a smile for everyone she encounters and boundless love for her family and friends. She also has a secret that threatens to tear her family apart.

Leigh slowly walks us through the daily life of Vera (Imelda Staunton, whose remarkably expressive face could alone drive a film) and her family. Solid husband Stan (the great Phil Davis) does mechanic work with his brother, affable son Sid (Daniel Mays) takes measurements in a tailor’s shop, and awkward neighbor Reg (Eddie Marsan) courts Vera’s daughter Ethel (Alex Kelly). Vera herself brings in money doing domestic work for a variety of households and, on occasion, helps out troubled young women around town.

Helps out, that is, by inducing abortions. Vera’s scheming, penurious friend Lily (Ruth Sheen), a chum since childhood, gives Vera referrals of women horrified to find themselves in the family way. About once a week for some 20 years, Vera has visited these women and pumped them full of a fluid that in a few days will, as she says, “make them bleed again.” She has kept her service a secret from her family—just as Lily has hidden from Vera the money she takes from the needy girls. However, when one of Vera’s girls develops a life-threatening infection, a police visit changes the course of Vera’s family life forever.

Certainly one might fear a film tackling the issue of abortion might degenerate into a polemic piece, but Vera Drake’s political concerns differ little from Leigh’s past work. While Leigh clearly sees the choices of Vera and her girls as well within their rights—years before the legal right to abortion in Britain—his film delves much deeper into class issues and personal politics, the battlegrounds of every Leigh film, than it does into this issue specifically. Leigh occasionally crosscuts from Vera’s story to a parallel situation unfolding in one of the wealthy homes in which she cleans, for instance. Susan (Sally Hawkins), a rape victim, doesn’t find the road to abortion easy—she must pass through a black-market bureaucracy that includes a friend, a doctor, and a psychiatrist. However, Susan’s ultimate access to a safe, hygienic procedure seems a world away from Vera and her travel kit.

Vera Drake also speaks about post-war reconstruction as much as abortion. Though World War II is only five years in the past, every character populating Vera Drake still feels its sting, all knowing the dead, the wounded, the POWs. Money is still scarce; the black market, a vestige of wartime rationing, still thrives. What we see are families slowly recovering from the trauma of war—slowly beginning to dance, court, and hope again. Like his Secrets and Lies or High Hopes, then, Leigh offers us a family in transition, beginning to come to terms with issues they had hoped to ignore. More than making any pro-choice statement, Leigh concerns himself here with how families finally tell each other secrets, and how they ask for and grant each other forgiveness.

Leigh’s increased interest in making period pieces makes most sense in this light. Of his last four features, three (including this one, his Gilbert and Sullivan treatment Topsy-Turvy, and his postpunk flashback-heavy drama Career Girls) are set at least partially in Britain’s past—the first three times he’s done so. But all of his films ask questions about how our pasts make us who we are, and in this context it becomes easier to see in Vera Drake the same man who made explosive, ultramodern pieces like Meantime (1984) and Naked (1993). Only now he asks the same questions about his country that he has always asked about people.

Per his usual working methods, Leigh wrote this screenplay after exhaustive workshops with his actors, during which the actors influenced Leigh’s final script by co-crafting their characters and improvising within the director’s scenarios. If Vera Drake packs marginally less punch that Leigh’s very best work, the combination of his unique methods and world-class actors like Davis, Sheen, and Staunton still guarantees that this film resonates with the highest emotional realism. And, perhaps inspired by the gentle soul surprised to find herself at the heart of its action, he has also delivered a film that emanates surprising hope that people can use the future to correct the mistakes of their pasts.