"The Virgin Mary - I spoke to her yesterday. She was outside the Post Office...."Even allowing for the fact that this film is 'mostly' based on the true story, The Lady In The Van turns out to be one of the movies where the idea is better than the treatment here. It is, nevertheless, quite enjoyable, largely owing to Maggie Smith's immensely sympathetic and sharp portrayal of the curmudgeonly elderly lady who inveigles her way into the lives of the inhabitants of a Camden street and of Alan Bennett the playwright in particular. However, the dual-persona-on-screen device in order to explore the writer/life-liver duality of the playwright is quite irritating and in the first half in particular detracts from the focal relationship, and the revelations about the Van Lady's life are rolled out a little unevenly. This will play well to its largely faux-liberal-valued middle-class older-middle-aged target audience, who indeed packed out this screening and had probably not ventured into a cinema since The Best Exotic Marigold... films, but the general moviegoing audience is unlikely to fall for its inherent parochial tweeness.
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