In Vera Drake, the ending of a brief sentencing, a white arcade-domed women’s prison and a mute joyless family Christmas will not provide fodder for either camp on the right-to-life issue, nor, everyone the loser, will it uplift anyone. As distinct from wishful utopian worlds, the practical matter-of-fact one that is, is far from perfect. Whether the British non-jury system is preferable to America’s sometimes circus trial approach, is not the point, though neither is it wholly Reg’s (Eddie Marsan) “it’s all right if you’re rich, it don’t seem fair.” His Majesty’s Judge’s (Jim Broadbent) verdict on “the extreme seriousness of your crime . . . [and] a deterrent to others” is just a fact, within the limitations of a system that is not “right” or “wrong” and cannot pander to Brentwood-style jury nullification.

Tackling problems of literally life and non-life that still agonize men fifty years later, Mike Leigh’s New York Film Festival entry Vera Drake is fictitious but tellingly dedicated to that writer-director’s parents, who were a doctor and a midwife. Its 1950 London is grey -- Norfolk is “bearable but horrible sunny”-- dowdy, cramped, interior Dickensian, sweaters are worn indoors, and when rain doesn’t drizzle down it snows.

But Vera Ruth Drake (Imelda Staunton) is a center of cheeriness wherever she goes, cleaning rich folks’ houses, visiting crippled George (Richard Graham) or her worn-down Mum (Sandra Voe), inviting solitary neighbors like Reg or her brother- and sister-in-law, or caring for her own husband and their two grown children.

Tall gawky son Sid (Daniel Mays) works in a custom-made tailor’s and gads about with two mates to pick up girls at pubs and dances; homebody, painfully shy and plain daughter Ethel (Alex Kelly) tests light bulbs in a factory and seems destined for spinsterhood; loyal and loving war-veteran husband of twenty-seven years, Stan (Phil Davis) works in an Automotive Engineers & Accident Repairs shop for his younger brother Frank (Adrian Scarborough), the latter equally loving and faithful to his snooty wife Joyce (Heather Craney).

The center and the life of them all, with “an ‘eart of gold, a diamond,” Vera serves endless cuppas, never removes her ‘at, and unquestioningly tries to ‘elp people, particularly those of her own sex in the proverbial trouble. She cannot bring herself to pronounce the word the Crown’s justice insists on, abortion, or even specify beyond “a long time”-- twenty years or so, is the compromise -- but without knitting needles or hooks, depending on tap water, grated carbolic soap, disinfectant and an enema Higginson syringe, she has strictly kept this secret from everyone except crafty, racist, false Lillian Clarke (Ruth Sheen). Her clandestine acts of charity illegal under an 1861 Offenses Against the Person Act on the books until the late 1960s, sincerely if naïvely from the heart she collects no money from her working lower-middle-class clients, unwed girls, would-be sophisticates, repentant adulteresses, frightened immigrants or indeterminate haggard married women with seven children already.

The Good Samaritan is so childlike that even veteran constabulary is awed. If there is any message intended, it would be, not about the law itself, but rather the disparity before that law between rich and poor. Three of those whose houses she faithfully cleaned decline to help, and another who will not even respond to an appeal does not know that her own date-raped pregnant daughter (Sally Hawkins) has paid “a hundred guineas, in cash, in advance,” to a licensed doctor, psychiatrist and sister-run hospital willing to look the other way.

The title heroine’s innocent goodness may stretch credulity, but such people do in fact exist, and, in any case, are not consequences usually ignored so long as things go smoothly? Aside from petty Lily, here there is no villain, no moralizing. In feel and in characters, Vera Drake goes back to the lamented small-studio work of mid-century Britain. In its difficult London N1 accents and sad fashions, small underheated flats and small pleasures, family and national unity, the film images an England just emerged from war and still suffering privation, but with the true heart that had so recently risen to its bulldog cigarred wartime leader.

(Released by Fine Line Features and rated "R" for depiction of strong thematic material.)