Almost beyond classification, "The Lady in the Van" seems at times to do almost everything in its power to taunt its viewer into reaching for the "STOP" button. For a start, it features an old and incontinent London-based lady, eccentric to say the least, who has nowhere else to reside but a van surrounded by a fair amount of her own accumulated garbage and other refuse, up to and including even her own faeces. We don't need smellovision to realise that this person must be possessed of a rank odour, and indeed the film's other main protagonist - her closest neighbour - makes that perfectly clear. He is a playwright by profession, portrayed from the outset as split into two separate individuals - artist and man - a presentation technique that many a watcher will find it hard to stay with. The whole thing looks like rather like a play from that playwright, which is in fact the true state of affairs, and the piece occasionally strays yet deeper into fantasy (especially at the end), while also devoting more than the odd minute to the minutiae of that playwright's life - an ostensibly rather dull one, if spiced by occasional crepuscular one-night-stands with younger and mostly rather denim- and leather-clad males.
Surely nobody is going to want to give 104 minutes of their life to this?
Plus the 15 or so minutes in the "Making of..." extra materials, assuming that person possesses the DVD?
But therein lies the clue, as anybody who sticks with this film from Director Nicholas Hytner will CERTAINLY want to go to the Extra Materials. For "The Lady in the Van" is a largely true story about the said old lady, who did indeed reside in a van in a street in Camden Down - the very street, the very house in which the film was made. What is more, that lady had been well-educated, gifted and even internationally famous before circumstances conspired to bring her low - and there in and of itself is a message for all of us of irreducible power. The said van was parked for 15 years (her last 15) in the drive of the house resided in by the said playwright, the latter being the world-famous Alan Bennett - the Yorkshire-accented near-national icon for many Brits, including many (most) who have never actually been to a Bennett play in their lives! While the real-life Bennett appears briefly in the film, the twin versions of him are mostly played here by the same actor as did the job on the London stage, Alex Jennings. Jennings does that job superbly, mesmerisingly well (even if the real Bennett's voice is a tad less effeminate), transforming into the character in a spellbinding manner made all the more impressive when one turns to those Extra Materials and sees the actor in real life. And of course his main interactions throughout are with the titular "Lady in the Van", as played by none other than Dame Maggie Smith (who had again appeared in the stage version, and made that her own).
It is these interactions (and above all the pithy, witty, often bitter-sweet lines exchanged) between two thespians largely without compare that make this piece impressive, though a supporting cast that genuinely makes a film out of the play is great in many and varied small roles. At least one of the members (the very well-known and as ever convincing Frances de la Tour) plays a real-life figure in the shape of Ursula Vaughan-Williams (1911-2007), the second wife (for the last 5 years) of what most would deem the UK's greatest and most lyrically British composer.
This is not a random fact, given that London and its Gloucester Crescent and the somewhat eccentric (but clearly very tolerant) bunch living there are also stars of this show (again helping the metamorphosis from play to film greatly); and we are told at one point that even the rejected wife of Charles Dickens had also once lived in the same street. You couldn't make it up, could you?
It is a background of faded grandeur of this kind - over years, decades and even centuries - that suffuses this somewhat Ealing Comedy-like film, which is nevertheless brutally 2015-realistic in its portrayal of disappointment and self-disgust set against desire to hang on to truth and dignity that are key factors in the lives of both key characters.
Perhaps not by chance, the subliminal historical side of the film is further reinforced by the repeat appearance of fragments of Piano Concerto No. 1, which composer Frederic Chopin wrote and performed aged 20 just before leaving Warsaw for an exile from which he never returned to his homeland (given that he died in France of TB aged 39). The piece is dramatic and inspirational, but of course also melancholy, and above all beautiful, and it fits here so very, very well...
While it might conceivably be argued that Bennett saw the potential for a play (and profit) in the close proximity of "the Van" and its inhabitant, we are left in little doubt that this is above all a story of exceptional kindness, patience and tolerance. Grudging, eccentric and ad hoc, certainly (and hence so archetypally British), but ultimately selfless, dogged and even in some measure devoted.
In summary, there is absolutely nothing spectacular or beautiful in this happily-very-British film except pitiless truth tempered by human decency and kindness, portrayed in the words of a great writer, as delivered by two stratospherically superb actors...
Perhaps that's enough?
Surely nobody is going to want to give 104 minutes of their life to this?
Plus the 15 or so minutes in the "Making of..." extra materials, assuming that person possesses the DVD?
But therein lies the clue, as anybody who sticks with this film from Director Nicholas Hytner will CERTAINLY want to go to the Extra Materials. For "The Lady in the Van" is a largely true story about the said old lady, who did indeed reside in a van in a street in Camden Down - the very street, the very house in which the film was made. What is more, that lady had been well-educated, gifted and even internationally famous before circumstances conspired to bring her low - and there in and of itself is a message for all of us of irreducible power. The said van was parked for 15 years (her last 15) in the drive of the house resided in by the said playwright, the latter being the world-famous Alan Bennett - the Yorkshire-accented near-national icon for many Brits, including many (most) who have never actually been to a Bennett play in their lives! While the real-life Bennett appears briefly in the film, the twin versions of him are mostly played here by the same actor as did the job on the London stage, Alex Jennings. Jennings does that job superbly, mesmerisingly well (even if the real Bennett's voice is a tad less effeminate), transforming into the character in a spellbinding manner made all the more impressive when one turns to those Extra Materials and sees the actor in real life. And of course his main interactions throughout are with the titular "Lady in the Van", as played by none other than Dame Maggie Smith (who had again appeared in the stage version, and made that her own).
It is these interactions (and above all the pithy, witty, often bitter-sweet lines exchanged) between two thespians largely without compare that make this piece impressive, though a supporting cast that genuinely makes a film out of the play is great in many and varied small roles. At least one of the members (the very well-known and as ever convincing Frances de la Tour) plays a real-life figure in the shape of Ursula Vaughan-Williams (1911-2007), the second wife (for the last 5 years) of what most would deem the UK's greatest and most lyrically British composer.
This is not a random fact, given that London and its Gloucester Crescent and the somewhat eccentric (but clearly very tolerant) bunch living there are also stars of this show (again helping the metamorphosis from play to film greatly); and we are told at one point that even the rejected wife of Charles Dickens had also once lived in the same street. You couldn't make it up, could you?
It is a background of faded grandeur of this kind - over years, decades and even centuries - that suffuses this somewhat Ealing Comedy-like film, which is nevertheless brutally 2015-realistic in its portrayal of disappointment and self-disgust set against desire to hang on to truth and dignity that are key factors in the lives of both key characters.
Perhaps not by chance, the subliminal historical side of the film is further reinforced by the repeat appearance of fragments of Piano Concerto No. 1, which composer Frederic Chopin wrote and performed aged 20 just before leaving Warsaw for an exile from which he never returned to his homeland (given that he died in France of TB aged 39). The piece is dramatic and inspirational, but of course also melancholy, and above all beautiful, and it fits here so very, very well...
While it might conceivably be argued that Bennett saw the potential for a play (and profit) in the close proximity of "the Van" and its inhabitant, we are left in little doubt that this is above all a story of exceptional kindness, patience and tolerance. Grudging, eccentric and ad hoc, certainly (and hence so archetypally British), but ultimately selfless, dogged and even in some measure devoted.
In summary, there is absolutely nothing spectacular or beautiful in this happily-very-British film except pitiless truth tempered by human decency and kindness, portrayed in the words of a great writer, as delivered by two stratospherically superb actors...
Perhaps that's enough?