Mary Shepherd has been kind to Alan Bennett. As the subject and title character of a short 1989 memoir that spawned a 1999 play at the National Theatre, a 2009 radio play and now this film version, she has surely repaid the generosity he showed in letting her park in his Camden Town driveway in the 1970s.
It is not really a spoiler to reveal that Shepherd, a malodorous and profoundly eccentric woman whose home was a Bedford CA van (later upgraded), stayed for 15 years. Her host's forbearance at her constant querulous badgering is something to behold, though in his telling of the original story, he was somewhat more splenetic.
We have only Bennett's word for what she was like, of course, but he seems like a reliable narrator because he subjects what he's doing to such intense scrutiny. In all its iterations, the story of the lady is really about Bennett's writing about her, to the extent that in play and film there are two Bennetts: "I'll live it and you write about it," one says to the other, and the conversations between them contain enough ironic detachment to guard against both sentimentalism and exploitativeness.
Meanwhile, it (mostly) treads the line between broad comedy and pathos. For every episode of lavatory humour, there is another of piercing sadness, and running like a silver thread through the narrative is a hint of the woman Shepherd was and might have been (hat tip to George Fenton's remarkable score).
Smith, recreating her stage performance, invests her character with the "vagabond nobility" that first attracted Bennett, but not at the expense of having - and giving us - a damn good time.
