Film Review: Sorry We Missed You
Sorry we Missed you, Ken Loach © Le Pacte
Jamie Singleton reviews Ken Loach’s latest film.
In Sorry We Missed You, the anticipated follow up to the critical and commercial success I, Daniel Blake, the enduring and celebrated commentator on British working culture, Ken Loach, returns with force. Fixing his sights again on the northeast, Loach has delivered another exhibition of people struggling to survive in modern Britain, this time zooming in on the pressure chamber that is the gig economy.
The film begins with the on-boarding interview between Ricky (played by Kris Hitchen) and his new boss Maloney (Ross Brewster), who fronts a courier service offering “flexible” driver-determined working hours, and who promises Ricky that on entering this job, he will become “his own boss”. Unsurprisingly, things are not so simple. Ricky’s path to self-employment comes with the constant threat of serious punishment if he puts a foot wrong. He borrows what he must from the company on a punishingly short leash: a broken scanner (which Maloney ominously calls a “gun”), missing delivery times, and lost or stolen items all come with the threat of extortionate costs for the driver. A fellow courier whose van has been damaged is refused the two hours needed to fix it, and his route is redistributed to Ricky, to whom the prospect of more pay is no less bitter than sweet, a longer “harder” route that comes at the cost of a friendship.
And it’s not just the drivers that pay. In order to avoid the extortionate daily van rental fees charged by the company, Ricky has few options (the family are already deep in debt thanks to the 2007-08 financial crisis) but to sell his wife Abbie’s car. As a carer for elderly and disabled people, Abbie works according to a punishingly restrictive schedule, made only more painful by her sudden reliance on limited public transport services. Looking after people who are unable to care for themselves, she must negotiate between the deeply private and personal nature of care, and the impersonal system that regards what she does as a “job”.
Characters are always answering to the impersonal structures that dictate what they do and how they carry out their roles, in a society supposed to help them live. After straying off schedule while cleaning up a patient’s excrement, Abbie’s boss insists that she cannot miss her schedule, again citing that the regulations and finance cuts have limited their ability to supply adequate support. Even Ricky’s self-proclaimed “nasty bastard number one” boss explains that he answers to the weight of the consumer demands that burden him with responsibilities. Ricky and Abbie’s son Seb (Rhys Stone), who skips school to graffiti unused wall-space, becomes another thorn in the domestic drama, driven to rebellion by the stifling atmosphere of the state-school system. When he lashes out during a fight at school, the state’s response is not to offer help or support, but to punish and isolate. His behaviour is never beyond the pale for a teenager whose family life is falling apart. Nobody is free from restriction.
Moments of tenderness do emerge from some of the cracks left in the suffocating system. Though the rules of the trade prevent it from happening again, Ricky’s daughter Lisa-Jane (Katie Proctor) sits in and helps him deliver packages, and brings some charm to the working day. When Ricky and Lisa-Jane have lunch together, the audience is afforded a panorama of the rural North-East, a nostalgic glance back to Loach’s second feature, Kes, and a moment of fresh air from the suffocation of the urban sprawl. But the moments of joy and comfort are in short-supply. As we drive through the film, despair looms over everything: Seb quashes the hope of higher education by citing his call-centre-bound, university-educated cousin. There does seem to be a degree of unreality in the Murphy’s Law narrative, but the density of the film’s hideous details does drive home the message: that people’s sense of their right to life is being squeezed out of them by the system that purports to let them live.
When Henry David Theroux left Concord to live on Walden Pond, his reason was in part that “the twelve labors of Hercules were trifling in comparison with those which my neighbors have undertaken”, a maxim which seems to apply aptly to Loach’s latest release. Ricky and Seb agree firmly on one thing: that his best “isn’t good enough”. But that’s the tragedy of those for whom the film stands: stretched even to the limit of their efforts, the characters are never able to do enough to heave themselves out of their misery. It is a life of quiet desperation. In a moment pretending to passion, Abbie and Ricky fall apart from each other in psychological and physical exhaustion, before agreeing that they “didn’t know how hard it was going to be”. How is it possible that life should have become so inhospitable?
There is nothing up front about the political attitudes of the film. Maybe the weight of the family’s duties is too great to allow them to look up. But the silence of the state looms large, and any viewer will wonder what the people at the head of the system can do. Perhaps we should let the film stand as a sign that it might be time for the nation to take a real step toward changing the nightmarish conditions Loach presents.