As evidenced by his last two pictures, eighty-three-year-old British filmmaking legend Ken Loach’s social critiques are as sharp as ever, his eyes still keen to the injustices inflicted on the working poor and, thankfully, offer no indication of slowing down. In 2016, he charted the spoils the unemployed and public assistance in the Cannes winner I, Daniel Blake. His latest, Sorry We Missed You, is an incisive examination of a working-class family exploited by the Draconian grind of the “gig” economy.
As with its predecessor, Loach returns to working class Newcastle in a picture that doesn’t pull punches in its indictment of the contemporary contractor labor model – rapid package delivery services, ridesharing, drivers of all kinds – an arrangement that is less an opportunity and more an exploitative, and often ruinous, bag of goods. You can break your back doing it, Loach says, but you’ll never get ahead and the cost on your family and health will be catastrophic. And when the blows come, here’s the kicker – no one cares. One day you are on top; the next, you’re out.
Initially, freelance package delivery seems like a good fit for Ricky Turner (former plumber Kris Hitchen), an unemployed laborer with a supportive wife named Abby (a loving Debbie Honeywood), who works as an home nurse to the elderly and disabled, troubled fifteen-year-old son Seb (Rhys Stone) and observant eleven-year-old daughter Lisa Jane (Katie Proctor). They may be tight knit by proximity of cramped quarters, but with parents working long, hard hours away from home and frequently exhausted, they are challenged to even sit down for late take-out dinner.
When Ricky gets a “job” as a transport driver with a logistics operation, it sets off a chain of events that reverberate across the family. Forced into an expensive van purchase for his package delivery route, Abby must give up her car – vital as she moves distances from home to home over any given day – and she ends up in a wearying tangle of city bus routes that keep her away the children. Jobs don’t grow on trees and they always come first.
Ricky’s contract arrangement quickly proves one of crass exploitation, where bogus driver fines quickly eat up a day’s wages – all part of the supervisor’s (Ross Brewster) plan of putting contractors in debt to him while pushing them to productivity rates so competitive, and electronically monitored at every turn, that they are unable to take mere restroom breaks.
Left to his devices after school, Seb acts out with friends and eventually faces expulsion for truancy, increasingly alienated from his exasperated father. This perfect storm of economic and familial tensions builds to a shattering confrontation that throws the entire, precarious family existence into jeopardy.
Still, it gets worse. Even a sole moment of family respite on a Saturday evening is interrupted by one of Abby’s distressed patients. Meanwhile, Ricky goes from golden to continually admonished at work for both unavoidable and innocuous behaviors, like having his family ride in the van that belongs to him, or facing an unavoidable personal crisis that takes him away from a shift – no mercy, indeed.
One of Loach’s great strengths – and on display in spades in my favorite Loach film, Ladybird, Ladybird – is an inability to sugarcoat his protagonists, who are victims of their circumstances but frequently flawed, Ricky here a beaten-down everyman sure, but one who is also an impatient father with a hair-trigger temper. In the family, his buffer between his troubled son is Abby, all saintly patience, scurrying around crowded streets between gigs, leaving everyone messages, ensuring their needs are met while her own remain a luxury.
What Sorry We Missed You leaves us with is a portrait of a family in crisis, and one who ultimately rises to face one, a tremendously moving denouement, to say the least, about the sacrifices required to stay afloat in a world that doesn’t know, or care, that you exist.
The inexperienced actors, particularly quietly reserved young Stone, are note-perfect, and young Proctor has a scene of such sensitivity it’s easy to believe that the emotional reactions of the cast members are merely a response to her honesty.
As always, Loach and screenwriter Paul Laverty have done their homework in the Newcastle locations and with gig economy workers, so the picture can feel, at times, like a case study in hardscrabble realism – and it’s all the better for it.
It may feel that the filmmaker so severely corners his characters in their sociopolitical quagmires that their punishments serve as polemics. But that’s too easy, really, for a filmmaker who for more than a half-century illuminating the plight of the exploited with such a compassionate lens. No American filmmaker can match Loach’s career-spanning dedication to strivers, workers and sufferers, and the small, human respites they seek as refuge the melee.
3 1/2 stars.
