“You’re looking especially lovely today, sweetheart,” shouts James Corden’s importunate costermonger from his market stall during The Lady in the Van. “Don’t sweetheart me,” snaps back Maggie Smith with the chilly eyed hauteur she has brought to a thousand scenes in Downton Abbey. “I’m dying – possibly.”
It’s part of Dame Maggie’s genius that she can take a role in which she falls so low and yet play substantially the same character as when she was performing someone lah-di-dah. Indeed, one of the film’s pleasures is to imagine it as tracking Downton’s dowager countess fallen on hard times. One minute, you’re Lady Violet in silks, yucking it up with Penelope Wilton and Hugh Bonneville over feudal healthcare provisions in 1920s Yorkshire. Next minute, you’re living in a van in Alan Bennett’s north London front garden, wearing a lamentable mac, smelling of wee, with only your sub-Lady Bracknell put downs and self-pitying imperiousness to remind you of your former dignity.
In this unacceptably inverted new social order, it’s Camden Town proles who get the best lines. “Chin up love – we’ve all got to go sometime,” retorts Corden, pausing for a beat before adding maliciously: “Smells like you already have.”
One thing that’s significant about the new spate of films about homelessness and social exclusion is that they come at a moment when, thanks to several factors including George Osborne and the heartless functioning of late capitalism, any one of us could be on the fuzzy end of life’s lollipop. One false move and any one of us could be dependent on Alan Bennett’s largesse. In Paul Bettany’s directorial debut Shelter, for instance, heroin-addicted Hannah (played by Bettany’s wife, Jennifer Connelly) sets up to beg on a New York street, with a coffee cup for change and a worn cardboard sign that reads: “I used to be someone.” At the outset of the new film Time Out of Mind, we see Richard Gere squatting in an apartment when the building manager played by Steve Buscemi tells him he can’t stay there any more. Gere replies that he is waiting on “her” – meaning, we come to realise, his daughter, who threw him out, possibly because he has become an alcoholic and has mental health problems.
Each film upsettingly dramatises the crossing of a thin line. Once, in The Simpsons, a drunk threw away a bottle only for it to be caught by a passing businessman. The latter chucked away his briefcase and lies in the gutter drinking from it. Each of us is that close to the abyss.
If they hand out goodie bags at screenings of Maggie Smith’s latest film (and they really shouldn’t), they should include badges that say: “Lady in the Van, c’est moi.” Her fate speaks to our current austerity-generated terrors: when cinema deals with homelessness, it invites us to enter empathetically into the shoes of the other in their misfortune, but it annuls that invitation in one and the same gesture by making the other a projection of our fears.
Homelessness films are additionally topical because they invite us fortunate ones to ask how compassionate we would be confronted with those who have fallen on hard times, be they refugees or dotty ladies clinging deludedly to vestiges of self-importance (“Shut the door!” she shouts incontrovertibly after some nice locals present her with Christmas presents at her van. “I’m a busy woman.”). In this respect, Bennett’s real-life charitable gesture in allowing an unfortunate lady off-street-parking privileges in her camper van on his drive (which, given Camden council’s residents parking charges, is probably worth several grand a year), makes us wonder what we would do in similar circumstances. One might suspect that the driveways of the streets near Bennett’s home are so chock full with Range Rovers bankrolled from venal bankers’ undeserved bonuses that they couldn’t accommodate a picaresque mad bat in her stationary rust bucket.
That kind of person is evoked in the film by the eyes of the most heartless north London denizens whose swivel eyes, decoded, read: “That’ll take a million plus off our resale values, damn your dogoodery Mr Bennett.” If you live in Gloucester Avenue, NW1, and you’re reading this, let me add the following: I don’t mean to suggest you’re a swivel-eyed monster. Why, you’ve probably got oodles of Syrian refugees sleeping in your 4x4 in the drive right now. Mind you, have you thought of how long they’re going to stay? “She came for three weeks,” says the film’s tagline. “She stayed for 15 years.” Are you ready to accommodate them until 2030? The problematic nature of the charitable gesture has long been a staple of cinema. In Jean Renoir’s 1932 film Boudu Saved from Drowning, Michel Simon’s eponymous tramp is saved from a plunge into the Seine by the bookseller Edouard Lestingois, who takes the bearded roughneck home. There, Boudu shows his gratitude by seducing the housemaid and Madame Lestingois. This, indeed, is where films about rescued unfortunates are most subversive: their protagonists are like grenades rolled into hidebound middle-class households, threatening to detonate all that they hold dear – money, sexual propriety, the ruthless hypocrisy masked as civilisation.
What’s more, such films dramatise the impossibility of gratuitous, no-strings-attached giving that so concerned philosophers such as Theodor Adorno (in Minima Moralia) and Jacques Derrida (in Given Time): both thinkers concluded that to give, to be charitable, can only reflect the giver’s dreary tastes and impose unwonted obligations of gratitude on the recipient. That’s to say, the gift giver, unless they are a saint, always wants something back. And so it is in cinema. How very dare Boudu put the moves on the staff of that nice Monsieur Lestingois! When is the Lady in the Van going to show proper appreciation to that kind Mr Bennett!
Strikingly, at the end of Boudu Saved from Drowning, our hero wins the lottery and so has riches enough to marry the seduced maid. But instead of joining the straight and narrow, during the wedding party he capsizes a rowing boat and floats off. He thereby returns, as my late Guardian colleague Richard Boston put it in his BFI book about the film, “to his old vagrancy, a free spirit once more.”
Does something similar happen at the end of Lady in the Van? I won’t spoil the ending, but let me say this: it seems unlikely that the van is fit for the open road.The battery is probably flat, apart from anything else.What Boudu (and its Hollywood remake, Down and Out in Beverly Hills) tell us, then, is not that us fortunates risk falling into hell, but rather that we are there already, mired among possessions and responsibilities. Boudu’s existential choice to float off is a rejection of the social and economic constraints that curtail the free spirit. It’s a romantically picaresque theme that has repeatedly seduced French film-makers. For instance, in Agnes Varda’s 1985 film Vagabond (released with the much more politically freighted French title – Sans Toit ni Loi, “Without Roof or Law”), Sandrine Bonnaire plays Mona, a former Parisian office worker who chooses to wander France’s wine regions free from responsibility. In this she was following the philosophy of Charlie Chaplin: at the end of the 1915 film The Tramp, he duffs up some hobos who were molesting a farmer’s daughter. The grateful farmer’s daughter promptly falls for him and puts him to work as a farm hand. But he not only fails at that job but realises he has to biff off when her fiancé shows up. Chaplin thus resumes his old life, unencumbered by all life’s usual entanglements. The open road for Chaplin, as later for Kerouac, is the path, not to oblivion, but to freedom.
Varda’s film, though, turns any such eulogy to vagabondage on its head. The film begins with the discovery of Mona frozen to death in a ditch and how she got there is told in flashback.
But the allure of the life of vagabondage remains. One reason why the cocker spaniel fancies the bit of canine rough in Disney’s Lady and the Tramp (1955) is because Tramp is a jaunty freedom-loving mutt with a heart of gold, rather than, say, a pampered pooch transported from dog grooming salon in its owner’s ludicrous handbag. Here, the tramp is truly the other: rather than a projection of our fears, he’s a realisation of our romantically antinomian fantasies. Albeit in the form of a cartoon dog.
A similar narrative arc is described in the forthcoming film Hampstead, in which Diane Keaton falls for Brendan Gleeson. Based, like The Lady in the Van, on a true north London story of social exclusion and kind middle-class exceptions to the Broken Britain rule, Hampstead features Gleeson as an Irish squatter who has been living in a ramshackle shack on Hampstead Heath for 17 years. But now, evil property developers seek to bulldoze in favour of a grotesque development of luxury flats. What heterosexual woman wouldn’t fall for a stirringly soulful, countercultural bit of rough who stands up to the Man, His boring real estate projects and His loathsome attempt to commodify nature’s bounty? Not Diane Keaton, is my guess.
Disney, unexpectedly, has more to teach us about poverty and social exclusion than Lady and the Tramp. At the end of Preston Sturges’ 1941 film Sullivan’s Travels, in which Joel McCrea plays a dissatisfied director of comic movies who decides to become a hobo to research his planned serious new film about marginality and social exclusion, our hero finds himself in a cinema. There, he notes the joy on the faces of an audience watching Disney’s Playful Pluto cartoon and realises that comedy can do more good for the poor than his proposed social drama, O Brother, Where Art Thou? Which, you have to admit, is some journey of self-justification for Sturges. And, indeed, Hollywood.
Just maybe, though, the moral of Sullivan’s Travels is right: humankind cannot, as TS Eliot wrote, stand very much reality. Particularly if the humankind in question is sitting in the cinema. And especially if that unbearable reality of human degradation is performed by leading thespians. One of the few films I’ve ever walked out of was Ironweed, starring Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson. What got on my wick was, in part, the ceaseless unfolding of unremitting misery on my dollar, but also the performance of that misery that self-regardingly draws attention to itself rather than the object of the performances, the improper wallowing in and appropriation of someone else’s suffering. Perhaps I was wrong to walk out. Perhaps I should have taken my medicine.
But sometimes it’s hard, for me at least, to suspend disbelief. Even when Sandrine Bonnaire is frozen to death in the ditch or Jennifer Connelly is begging for drug money, I can’t but help be distracted by the actor’s beauty, by the sense that they will, any minute now, dust themselves down and head off for a photoshoot or film role more befitting their glamour. Would I empathise more if the downtrodden were played by ugly, ideally unknown actors, you might well ask? Well, and I say this hanging my head in shame, probably.
This is the problem, or rather my shortcoming: when cinema portrays the marginal and the excluded, often it does so with actors so lovely or so associated with other roles that it’s hard to suspend one’s disbelief to really enter into their predicament. Right now, I’m trying to believe Richard Gere is a homeless, mentally ill alcoholic, but I still see him as a serene Buddhist meditating with Lisa Simpson or as the Officer and the Gentleman in impeccable dress whites carrying off Debra Winger for a bit of slap and tickle.
Maybe a better alternative is to approach human adversity obliquely, through comedy like the Lady in the Van or the heartwarming romance of Hampstead. But both risk allowing audiences to treat suffering as entertainment, or worse, a means to delude ourselves into thinking that others’ adversity need not bother us unduly.
That’s the problem of cinema when it tries to depict human suffering such as homelessness or poverty – we might try to think about the gutter but we end up just looking at the stars.
• The Lady in the Van is released in the UK on 13 November
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