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
