It’s a year of Oscar buzz for Maggie Smith, Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda, Blythe Danner and Charlotte Rampling. How come they can’t write great roles for actresses under 65 anymore?
Smith is a delight — is she ever not? — in “The Lady in the Van,” a memoir-movie inspired by the curious relationship between mild-mannered London playwright Alan Bennett (Alex Jennings) and the smelly, exasperating and formidable bag lady who parked her van outside his house for 15 years.
As the latter, whose name is either Margaret or Mary, Smith brings as much salt and vinegar as a basket of fish and chips: As insistent and prideful as she is pathetic, she covers her van with Union Jacks and portraits of the queen, resisting all hints that she camp out elsewhere. Neighbors harrumph in disapproval — the way Bennett describes her odor makes you appreciate what a disaster she is for the neighborhood — and yet there is a grudging acceptance of what she is, which is a bona fide character.
Smith’s appeal, just, holds together a thin plot upon which Bennett, who wrote the script, and director Nicholas Hytner have loaded gimmicks, such as a thin running gag in which Bennett’s personality splits into a “writer” and a “person,” both of whom are played by the same actor using special effects and who argue tiresomely about whether the homeless woman is simply irresistible great material or a damaged human being in need of aid.
Their debates don’t go any further than the van, which moves only if you push or tow it, and once the Smith character is established the movie doesn’t have a lot of plot other than a few fairly banal revelations about her back story. Hytner’s big finish, moreover, is regrettable.
Still, one endearingly strange central figure is more than most movies deliver. And the movie’s mix of passivity and grit, of hostility and politeness, of eccentricity and rule-following, adds up to something: a meditation on that peculiar state of existence called Englishness.