Just saw Vera Drake, which is, not surprisingly, a wonderful movie. Imelda Staunton deserves an Academy Award. Yet I wasn't quite satisfied by it. After seeing Vera Drake, much as after seeing Topsy-Turvy, I felt boundless admiration for the movie's craft and intelligence, but also a sense that my high hopes had been met, but not exceeded. It reminds me of something that Noah said on the night we saw Topsy-Turvy: "That was exactly what I expected." Vera Drake is sort of like that, and I'm just starting to figure out why.

Mike Leigh famously writes his movies after working out the story in a long improvisational collaboration with his team of actors, allowing the plot to come naturally from the characters and setting. This usually results in a movie where everything comes from character, including the plot, which is character-driven in the purest way. As a result, his films are always full-blooded and free of cliché, but they're also deficient in the uncanny, shocking, or arbitrary moments that I look for in movies, and which cannot come from character.

My favorite movies, ranging from Vertigo and The Red Shoes to Dancer in the Dark and Million Dollar Baby, are almost cosmically unfair. What happens to the the characters in these movies, while superficially the consequence of their own actions, is also the result of a playful, dangerous, or unfathomable universe. Even trashier movies sometimes capture this feeling. I respond to the absurd plot twists and acts of fate in lesser movies because they justify my suspicion that, in real life, what happens to us is not always the result of our own characters, but of some capricious or malevolent nemesis. And this sort of high narrative perversion is inherently factored out of Leigh's scrupulously fair movies, while ironically remaining accessible to far lesser directors.

In any case, you should still see Vera Drake, if only for Reg's final speech: "This is the best Christmas I've had in a long time. Thank you very much, Vera. Smashing!" And do I really wish that Leigh were more cruel or less fair? Not especially. After all, the world already has one Lars von Trier, and maybe that's more than enough.