Maggie Smith is old now. As of December 28, she is 81. Few actresses make it to this sort of finish line. Watching her earlier in her career, say The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969), one might not have backed her in the longevity sweepstakes. Surely her febrile, high-strung air of manic dare-devilry, plus acid tongue and no meat on her bones, would use her up fast. Sometimes it's the sinuous, anxious ones with a work ethic who endure. She repeats her 1999 stage triumph as a mad homeless woman in Alan Bennett's screen adaptation of his play adapted from field notes and always called The Lady in the Van, opening Friday, Jan. 22, at the Clay and Century 9.
The Lady in the Van is drawn from Bennett's experience as a homeowner on whose front drive in 1974, and by invitation, Miss Shepherd parked the van in which she was living, to thwart the parking police of Camden Town. Bennett rides a bike, doesn't need a drive, thinks nothing of a gesture that makes the neighbors shudder and wince. No one wants a smelly, pigheaded, cantankerous, divinely guided right-wing old harridan, except this one particular 40-year-old gay writer with an eye for the social outcast, who doesn't mind a sharp daily dose of madness on his doorstep. God bless him.
Charity, a dirty word in these cruel times and one Bennett would never use, is nevertheless the greatest form of Love, and powers his meditation on old age, shit, and alienation. Does he feel guilty he's not spending time with his actual mother, a widow starting to drift gently off into obsolescence? Or is Miss Shepherd simply Bennett's ideal mum? Proud, private, and it turns out, also an artist, a pianist. The doubling of the mother is matched by the splitting of Bennett into he-who-sits-by-the-window-and-writes and he-who-interacts-with-the-world. Both Bennetts are played precisely by Alex Jennings. The depiction of plucky survival is thus paralleled by scenes of a writer's life, which is seen to amount to a certain resignation to the stories that impose themselves.
On the stage, The Lady in the Van ran three hours in preview, two-and-a-half-hours on opening; the film runs under two hours. The essence of this story is detail accumulated and juxtaposed with further snippets. It makes for choppy storytelling. Onstage you can suggest what on film must look real but can feel stolid. Indeed, Gloucester Crescent and Bennett's actual house comprise the film set. Nicholas Hytner, who brilliantly staged the original play, does not find an equivalent cinematic style. He borrows from the Harry Potter franchise a cheery hyperrealism peopled with British stage greats, and ladles on an orchestral score that overwhelms the stark joy of this eccentric saga.
I saw Lady in the Van at the Queen's Theater in London, sitting beside a large drunken blonde in full-length sable, in 2000. I couldn't believe Bennett had managed to get a West End audience to sit still for this very queer story of a gay man's relationship with a madwoman. Maggie Smith was the lynch-pin. Every fiber of her being was invested in the gamut of Miss Shepherd's existential struggles, alternately pompous and abject, dotty and hawk-eyed, ridiculous and sublime. As an audient, I was shredded by pathos and simultaneously buoyed by this singular character's apotheosis. Deification on a London stage for one old lady does not, alas, translate into more charity in the streets.
Au contraire. There are now many more homeless, stateless, abandoned, bombed-out, unemployed, and immigrating people than in 1974. The concern today is for security, not charity. Paranoia is a way of life. The Lady in the Van seems like a fairy story and will be viewed by many as "mere" comedy, by which they mean insignificant. The film made me weep, because despite its flaws, The Lady in the Van is a big-hearted film about the difficult daily rituals that keep body and soul together. One of them is art.