The Lady in the Van (2015)

Film: The Lady in the Van (2015)
Stars: Maggie Smith, Alex Jennings, Jim Broadbent (plus a lot of really fun cameos that I won't spoil here)
Director: Nicholas Hytner
Oscar History: Smith received nominations for the Globes & BAFTA, indicating a strong play (I'd argue that it was either she or Mirren who was in sixth place at the Oscars that year), but 2015 was arguably Best Actress's strongest slate in this decade, and so she just missed out on a seventh Oscar citation.
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

This morning we returned to 2015, and I have every intention of continuing to plow through 2015 so that I can get that year off of my back.  But before we can bid that annum adieu, we have to catch a pair of 2015 films that were nominated for major acting precursors, but for some reason I never got around to at the time.  The first of these films is arguably the one that made the most sense as a precursor (the other sort of came out of nowhere), and I suspect was just a few votes short of being part of our OVP to begin with: The Lady in the Van.  What initially felt like just another toss-away "I can do it in my sleep" Maggie Smith role actually ended up being a bit more challenging work from the actress, or so the critics had proclaimed.  As a result, I watched this with interest to see if Smith, one of the best actresses of her generation who seems to have caught a whiff of the "Robert de Niro/Coasting Legend Syndrome" could actually create a compelling new creation.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film focuses on the real-life relationship between Alan Bennett (Jennings), the noted playwright and author of The History Boys, as well as Mary Shepherd (Smith), an eccentric older woman who would be all-but-homeless were it not for the van that she lives in on Bennett's block.  They develop a strained friendship, with Bennett fascinated by her, having her inspire his work (much to his chagrin) and in many ways she reminds him of the mother with whom he has a complicated relationship, not least of which because he's hiding his homosexuality from her and the world.  Shepherd seems to have lived a dozen lives, once a war nurse and a concert pianist and potentially a killer (this is how Smith opens the film, with her hitting a man with her car, seemingly by accident but it continually haunts her).  Their friendship turns into something real, and we watch as she lives essentially in his driveway for fifteen years, never entirely giving in on her own independence even as she continues to rely on Bennett more heavily.

The movie has a few quirks that you'd only find in a British comedy.  Bennett is actually two separate characters, one a flesh-and-blood man & the other his manifested subconscious, where he has conversations about the things he's hiding from the world and the way that he resents himself for continually writing about Shepherd rather than his own life or his romantic pursuits.  The movie is littered with cameos, including all of the original History Boys, which is wonderful to see (James Corden & Sacha Dhawan are my favorites of the bunch here, and of course Russell Tovey plays the random lover, because Russell Tovey is always a sex bomb whenever he's onscreen so why not lean into it?), which occasionally keeps the plot moving as it becomes a bit repetitive and Bennett as a protagonist is at times infuriating; he keeps his own personality at arm's length, and it doesn't make it better when he's expository about it late in the film.

But the movie is worth the price if only for Smith (and the cameos), as she truly hasn't been this good on the big screen in years, perhaps since Gosford Park.  Smith finds some interesting humanity in a character she could have just gone-through-the-motions with and still gotten a similarly solid box office.  I love the ways that she gives us hints of not just the woman she once was, but the woman she might have been had tragedy and mental illness not struck.  The big scene where she sits at the piano, in the dark, could have been indulgent in a lesser actors care, but here it feels so real, so heartbreaking as she must break the shell of a character she's needed to craft to get through each day, and must only for a moment find a window into a world she once inhabited.  In almost any other year, this would've been an easy Oscar nomination  (put this in 2014 or 2016, for example, and she'd have made it, and probably not even in fifth place), but I'm glad the Globes & BAFTA found room so that I could catch this late gem in Smith's career.