Monthly Archives: November 2019

  • Sorry We Missed You

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ken Loach (2019)

    Ken Loach is eighty-three now.  The opening minutes of his latest film bring to mind unworthy thoughts of old people repeating themselves.  Fortyish Ricky Turner (Kris Hitchen) is being interviewed for a job as a delivery driver with an outfit called PDF (Parcels Delivered Fast).  Over the years, he’s done all sorts of labouring – laying concrete, gardening, plumbing, and more.   As he tells his unsmiling interviewer, PDF manager Maloney (Ross Brewster), Ricky takes pride that he’s never been on the dole.  But he and his family – he’s married, with two kids – have been struggling ever since the 2008 recession and are badly in debt.  He tells Maloney he’d now ‘rather be my own boss’ but he’s a million miles away from that.  It’s immediately clear that conscientious, worried Ricky is a typical working man, ripe for exploitation.  Heavy-set, brutish-looking Maloney is the boss figure.  They’re hero and villain respectively.  Nothing that happens subsequently alters this first impression but Sorry We Missed You does have unexpected elements, as well as a strong, upsetting storyline.  Written by his usual collaborator Paul Laverty, it develops into one of Loach’s most persuasively affecting films of recent years.

    Maloney’s spiel in the opening job interview is an economical and effective way of setting out key conditions of this particular area of the gig economy.  He may be charmless but Maloney still means to put a positive spin on these.  Ricky will be paid not wages but ‘fees’ (per parcel delivered).  He’ll be self-employed, working not ‘for’ but ‘with’ PDF, as an ‘owner-driver’.   That means he needs his own delivery van, either buying it on credit after paying, in his circumstances, a very hefty deposit or renting the vehicle from PDF at £65 a day.  Ricky works twelve-hour shifts but the rental costs would wipe out most of his daily ‘fees’.  He and his wife Abby (Debbie Honeywood) sell their car, which she uses for work, for his down payment on the van.  That means Abby, also a toiler in the gig economy, has to get the bus to visit her ‘clients’ – infirm, mostly elderly people for whom she provides care in their homes.

    Informative as the first scene is, what Maloney tells Ricky is only a taster for what he’ll have to contend with.  The more outrageous rules of the game are revealed more dramatically.  PDF’s scanning system tracks drivers as well as parcels:  if Ricky’s out of his van for more than two minutes, he receives a warning beep.  If he’s unable to do a shift, it’s his responsibility to find a replacement driver.  PDF does supply each driver with a free plastic bottle – to pee in, so as to avoid wasting time on a toilet visit.  (This comes as no surprise, of course, after the recent news stories about Amazon delivery drivers.)   Maloney’s warning that if rules aren’t obeyed there’ll be hell to pay is all too apt.  Drivers are fined, and heavily, for every conceivable transgression.

    Ricky and Abby’s children are both bright but the age difference between them is crucial.  Eleven-year-old Liza Jane (Katie Proctor) is co-operative at home and doing well at school.  Her teenage brother Seb (Rhys Stone) is old enough to see what economic forces are doing to families like his, and has decided it’s not worth trying to beat the system.  He’s one of a group of friends who skive off school and spend most of their time spray-painting buildings.  The graffiti inevitably evokes the film’s immediate predecessor I, Daniel Blake (2016) – as does the North East setting of Sorry We Missed You (although Ricky’s a Mancunian).  The differences in hair colouring within the family are simply expressive.  Ricky is ginger and Abby fair, Liza Jane somewhere between the two.  Seb’s hair is darker brown.

    Ken Loach’s love and admiration for his working-class characters is heartfelt but time-warped and idealised.  These people are, as they always were, being screwed by capitalism and right-of-centre politicians:  simple as that.  None of the have-nots in Loach’s Britain ever has a bad word to say about immigrants or reckons Nigel Farage has the right idea.  Most prominent among the old people Abby visits is Mollie (Heather Wood), who brings out her photographs from the mid-1980s, when she and others ran a support centre for miners’ families during the strike.  In case you don’t get the point that Abby is thoroughly loving and caring, Loach has his DP Robbie Ryan give madonna lighting to Debbie Honeywood’s pretty, open face (a bit reminiscent of Samantha Morton’s).

    The happier moments in Sorry We Missed You are very appealing and not only because they’re rare.  They also have real warmth.  One Saturday evening, the Turners sit down together to an Indian takeaway.  The good time is short-lived, the meal interrupted when Abby gets an emergency call (from Mollie) that she feels compelled to go out on.  A more extended upbeat episode takes place earlier on the same day, when Liza Jane accompanies Ricky on his round, which they both enjoy.  Their journey is predictable, though.  When they deliver a parcel to a block of council flats, a nice woman there gives Liza Jane a tip; when Ricky pulls up outside a large detached house, things are bound to go wrong.  Your heart sinks for more than one reason.

    No one answers the front door of the big house.  Ricky opens a side gate to deposit the package in the designated ‘safe place’ and disappears within.  He has an altercation with an angry dog, heard but not seen.  He emerges cursing the dog for taking ‘a chunk out of my arse’.  It’s not as bad as that but Liza Jane, amused, writes a cheeky message, ‘You owe my dad a new pair of boxers’, on the ‘Sorry We Missed You’ card they put through the letterbox.   This triggers a complaint to PDF.  Maloney, when he learns that Liza Jane was with him, tells Ricky that can’t happen again.  Ricky doesn’t understand – ‘My daughter, my van, my insurance?’ he protests.  Maloney isn’t budging.  It’s against the rules.  Ricky must drive his windowless white van alone.

    Yet some more surprising aspects emerge at the workplace, and give the narrative more texture.  First, there’s an incident that shows how the every-man-for-himself PDF system brings out bitter aggression between the drivers rather than workers’ solidarity.  Second, Maloney, while remaining a bastard, is given a monologue in which he says he knows what everyone at the depot thinks of him, and explains his determination to run a tight ship.  In view of the Loach-Laverty tendency to present representatives of a vicious system merely as part of it, giving a character like Maloney this opportunity is refreshing.

    Better still are a speech delivered by a police officer (Stephen Clegg), when Seb is arrested for shoplifting, and the aftermath to this.  Ricky has no option but to abandon his round to get to the police station.  The officer, before releasing Seb with a caution, urges him not to reoffend and to realise how lucky he is to have such a caring father.  Without breaking the law again, Seb’s behaviour is even worse in the next day or two.  Rhys Stone, who has a striking deep voice, is good enough to make this reaction ambiguous.  Seb could be expressing either increased resentment at authority or a guilty conscience.  The cast are, as usual in Loach, mostly unfamiliar faces, though neither Kris Hitchen nor Debbie Honeywood is a wholly inexperienced actor.  They’re perfectly cast and highly effective.  Neither shows great variety but this actually helps reinforce Loach’s picture of the Turners’ situation.

    In a similar way, the inexorable build-up of unfortunate events might seem to be forcing the grimness but is, I think, a necessary means of showing the family as trapped.  (None of the events is by itself implausible.)  While the climax to I, Daniel Blake was emotionally powerful, Sorry We Missed You’s is more complex and convincing.  While peeing in his plastic bottle, Ricky is set upon by men who beat him up, chuck his urine in his face and make off with parcels in the van.  Waiting in A&E with Abby, he gets a call from Maloney, who, in spite of what’s happened, is still accusing Ricky of dereliction of duty.  Abby grabs the mobile from Ricky and, furiously upset, gives Maloney a piece of her mind.  It’s a cathartic moment, for the viewer as well as for her.  Next morning, Ricky’s in no fit state for work but he gets in his van.  It’s a bit melodramatic when his wife and kids physically try to prevent his driving off but the message of the scene makes realistic as well as emotional sense:  Ricky must carry on working.  We don’t know what will happen.  We’ve already seen him cause a minor accident by falling asleep at the wheel; he’s now driving at what looks to be worrying speed.  If Ricky gets to the depot in one piece, will Abby’s outburst in the hospital mean he’s got the sack?

    ‘This brilliant film will focus minds’, proclaims the Guardian.  Yes, but only the minds of Guardian readers.  Watching Sorry We Missed You left me thinking, as usual, that Ken Loach is nowadays an ineffectual polemicist – preaching to the converted, fuelling anger (and guilt) within a liberal middle-class audience almost exclusively.  Yet Loach is dogged as well as dogmatic; perhaps because you wonder (again, nowadays, as usual) if this will be his last film, you’re moved by his intransigence.  T S Eliot had something different in mind but both Ricky Turner and Ken Loach evoke lines in ‘The Dry Salvages’.  They’re men who are only undefeated because they have gone on trying.

    5 November 2019

  • Goodbye, Mr Chips

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Herbert Ross (1969)

    In both James Hilton’s 1934 novella Goodbye, Mr Chips and the first, famous Hollywood film adaptation five years later, the title character’s marriage is tragically brief.  Chipping, a shy and solitary classics master at Brookfield, a (fictional) public school for boys, is brought out of his shell by a young woman he meets while on holiday.  After she dies in childbirth, Chipping never remarries but love has transformed him.  He teaches at Brookfield for many more years but is no longer the dry-as-dust taskmaster he once was.  In retirement, he continues to live close to the school.  On his deathbed, he hears former colleagues talking about him.  He replies, ‘I thought you said it was a pity, a pity I never had any children.  But you’re wrong.  I have!  Thousands of ’em, thousands of ’em … and all … boys.’

    This film musical version of Goodbye, Mr Chips retains that ‘all boys’ line but Terence Rattigan’s screenplay recasts Hilton’s story in several ways.  Arthur Chipping (Peter O’Toole) first sees his future wife Katherine Bridges (Petula Clark) in a London theatre, where she’s performing on stage – she’s a music hall soubrette.  (They do, by an incredible coincidence, next meet on holiday, while each is wandering round the ruins of Pompeii.)  Katherine’s theatrical background and tendencies make it hard for her to adjust to life as a schoolmaster’s wife but she does so in time, and becomes a popular member of the Brookfield community, especially among the boys.  The Chippings’ marriage is childless but lasts a good few years.  In the advanced timeframe of the story, which begins in the 1920s and ends in the 1960s, Katherine dies in a World War II air raid – on the same day that her husband, after being passed over previously by the school governors, learns, too late to tell his wife, that he’s to become headmaster.  The narrative takes the widowed Chips into retirement and old age but he’s still going pretty strong, taking his walk in a country lane near Brookfield, when the closing credits roll.

    According to Wikipedia, a draft musical adaptation of Goodbye, Mr Chips had been ‘on file in the MGM script department since 1951’ but things didn’t progress until the mid-1960s.  From that point on, all the key personnel changed at least once before shooting got underway in 1968.  After first Vincente Minnelli then Gower Champion had left the project, it became the debut feature of Herbert Ross, who’d directed a musical for television but hitherto worked solely as a choreographer in cinema.  Leslie Bricusse’s song score replaced one written by Andre and Dory Previn.  The first names in the frame to play the leads were Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews.  Katherine turned into Samantha Eggar, Lee Remick and finally Petula Clark.  As Chips, Richard Burton, who’d followed on from Harrison, parted company with the production when Clark was cast, dismissing her as ‘a pop singer’.  Peter O’Toole stepped in.

    Rookie Herbert Ross was hardly in a position to stamp his personality on an expensive MGM production, and didn’t.  The film has the usual inflated feel of the Hollywood musical in decline:  Ross is keen, for example, on grandiose overhead shots to describe scenes that don’t justify them.  The two ensemble numbers with Petula Clark at their centre – one in the London theatre, the other on the school hall stage with some of the Brookfield boys – work well enough.  But Bricusse’s score, with the exception of Katherine’s sweetly melancholy solo ‘You and I’, is mediocre – a quality emphasised rather than concealed by the soaring orchestration sometimes in evidence.  The modest songs are more effective when Peter O’Toole is speak-singing them.  They become part of his marvellous portrait of Chips.

    O’Toole was thirty-six when he made the film.  For someone like me, coming to it for the first time half a century on, there’s a risk of underestimating the scale of his achievement in convincingly playing a character from his mid-thirties through to old age.  Seeing him age so naturally here can’t have the impact it would have had in 1969 simply because I saw O’Toole actually age as a screen actor, from Lawrence of Arabia (1962) to Dean Spanley (2008).   The hair and make-up (by George Blackler, Ivy Emmerton and Bill Lodge) are good – only on the geriatric Chips does it look like aging make-up – but it’s the combination of O’Toole’s technical skill and imaginative sympathy that’s at the heart of his characterisation and which creates its magic.  His mastery of the man’s subtly changing speech and movement across the decades is also a reflection of how deeply he inhabits Chips.

    As might be expected, O’Toole is as funny as he is affecting – for example, in showing sloppy use of the English language to be almost physically painful to Chips.  In the early stages of the romance with Katherine, he’s beautifully diffident:  he stands, inclined (in both senses) to move nearer to her but uncertain if he should.  His face shows tiny frown lines of anxious hesitancy.  The tasteful invention of his line readings is a wonder.  At two points of the story, Chips races out of the school grounds in pursuit of Katherine, being borne away first on a bus, then in a car.  Both travel faster than Chips’s legs can carry him but the literally dashing figure of O’Toole, so tall and slender he might be a cartoon, is something to behold.  In terms of expressive movement, these sprints are as good as many movie musical dance sequences.  The emotion in O’Toole’s eyes, behind spectacles, when he absorbs the news of Katherine’s death in the middle of a lesson and, later, when Chips conducts his final assembly, makes these moments extraordinarily moving.

    As both singer and actress, Petula Clark is competent but she’s too bland and wholesome for the woman she’s meant to be.  Katherine doesn’t have to be coarse but does need to convey why the Brookfield establishment at first sees her as highly unsuitable.  It’s hard to see what a snob or stick-in-the-mud would object to in the charming, ladylike Petula Clark.  In the 1939 film, the young woman who brings Robert Donat’s Chips to emotional life is differently outrageous – she’s a suffragette (played by Greer Garson).  Turning Katherine into a soubrette is best justified by Siân Phillips’s bravura comic turn as Ursula Mossbank, the high-camp cynosure of Katherine’s circle of bohemian friends.  Superbly dressed (by Julie Harris), Phillips delivers her lines not just with high-speed panache but also, thanks to her vocal range and control, without apparent effort – or seeming to draw breath.  The strong supporting cast also includes Michael Redgrave, as the headmaster of Brookfield; Alison Leggatt, as his formidably disapproving wife; Michael Bryant, as a German teacher on the staff; George Baker, as a philandering ‘philanthropist’ and all-round nasty piece of work; and Michael Culver, as the friend who introduces Chips to Katherine.

    It would be interesting to know how much changes to the original were Terence Rattigan’s own idea and how much imposed on him as supposedly necessary ingredients of a Hollywood musical-isation of the source material.  Rattigan had already, twenty years before in The Browning Version, got under the skin and revealed the soul of a long-serving public school classics master whose pupils thought him severe and humourless.  (Michael Redgrave’s presence in Goodbye, Mr Chips is a continuing reminder of that.)  Even though the plotting is obvious and sometimes clumsy, Rattigan’s dialogue, especially for Chips, is very good.  It often seems to reflect a penetrating insight into the main relationships in the story.   Herbert Ross’s direction tends to telegraph the dramatic twists and crises but O’Toole keeps rescuing the situation.

    Sally and I saw Goodbye, Mr Chips as part of BFI’s musical season.  The film was preceded by an interview with Siân Phillips (who was married to Peter O’Toole at the time it was made).  Now eighty-six, she still looks and sounds wonderful[1].  It was a special bonus for Sally when Phillips, asked by the interviewer to name her all-time favourite musical, chose Pal Joey because it was the start of her own career in stage musicals.  This was a 1980 production that Sally saw at the Half Moon Theatre (before it transferred to the West End), loved and has never forgotten.  (Denis Lawson was Joey.)  BFI presented this show as a special ‘50th anniversary screening’ of Goodbye, Mr Chips.  Since it’s not regarded as a film musical classic, that sounded a bit OTT.  But Peter O’Toole’s great performance is worth celebrating.

    20 October 2019

    [1] Phillips shared the NFT3 stage with an amiable man, now in his sixties, who played one of the Brookfield schoolboys.  I’m afraid I didn’t take a note of his name and can’t track it down on the IMDb cast list.

     

     

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