No drama or struggle in ‘Maudie’

There is a certain kind of movie, a form of torture in disguise, that you are obligated to like, if you want to consider yourself a nice, sensitive, intelligent person. You might internalize this obligation so completely that you even convince yourself you like it. This phenomenon we might call the Vera Drake syndrome, named after the relentlessly poignant and almost unwatchable Mike Leigh film that, in a case of mass critical psychosis, got good reviews in 2004 from almost everybody, including me.

“Maudie” is this year’s entry in the Vera Drake sweepstakes.