A novel spate of films,including The Lady in the Van, invites us to empathise with the marginal and excluded. But what finish cinematic representations of vagabondage reveal about our response to human suffering?“You’re looking especially lovely nowadays, or 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 choose 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, and one of the film’s pleasures is to imagine it as tracking Downton’s dowager countess fallen on tough 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, and you’re living in a van in Alan Bennett’s north London front garden,wearing a lamentable mac, smelling of wee, and with only your sub-Lady Bracknell place downs and self-pitying imperiousness to remind you of your former dignity.
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Source: theguardian.com