[“You don’t work for us, you work with us.” That’s the
pitch the boss makes for the exciting new job opportunity he dangles
in the opening scene of Sorry We Missed You, Ken Loach’s latest
lament for the downtrodden.] [[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

KEN LOACH GRINDS ANOTHER HONEST MAN UNDER THE CRUEL GEARS OF SOCIETY
IN 'SORRY WE MISSED YOU'  
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A.A. Dowd
March 5, 2020
AV Club
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_ “You don’t work for us, you work with us.” That’s the pitch
the boss makes for the exciting new job opportunity he dangles in the
opening scene of 'Sorry We Missed You', Ken Loach’s latest lament
for the downtrodden. _

Ken Loach's 'Sorry We Missed You', Photo: Kino Lorber

 

“You don’t work for us, you work _with_ us.” That’s the
pitch Maloney (Ross Brewster) makes for the exciting new job
opportunity he dangles in the opening scene of _Sorry We Missed You_,
Ken Loach’s latest lament for the downtrodden masses. Maloney, who
has the physique and disposition of your gym’s least forgiving
trainer, is a supervisor at a package delivery company that
independently contracts all its drivers—it’s like UPS by way of
Uber. What he’s selling is the ideal of professional autonomy. Drive
your own van! Own your own franchise! Be your own boss! To Ricky
Turner (Kris Hitchen), it all sounds like a dream come true. Ricky,
after all, has spent his whole life paving, plumbing, roofing,
mending, and breaking his back for companies that saw him and his
labor as disposable. It’s about time he tossed off the shackles of
subordination and became, in Maloney’s well-chosen words, “the
master of his destiny.”

You don’t need to be a used and abused cog of the gig economy to
suspect that this grand promise of self-employment is a lie—that
Ricky’s delusions of independence and upward mobility will
inevitably be shattered. He is, after all, the main character in a Ken
Loach movie: honest, industrious, destined to suffer for the sins of a
pitiless society. Loach, the biggest beating heart in the English film
industry, has spent most of his half-century in movies and television
sticking up for the little guy, for the working men and women of his
country. In recent years, that noble imperative has consumed all other
aspects of his work; the writer-director of gripping classics
like _Kes_ and _Riff-Raff_ now makes diatribes pounded into the
vague shape of drama—not so much message movies as messages in
search of movies. _Sorry We Missed You_ fits cleanly into that
agitprop tradition. But for a good long while, anyway, it does offer
the kind of involving quotidian texture that Loach excels at when
he’s not simply steering the steamroller over his characters to make
a point about society’s ills.

Ricky, as we quickly learn, is head of a household in Newcastle
that’s been struggling ever since the 2008 financial collapse, which
effectively destroyed their plan to buy their own home. To put a
deposit on the big white van he’ll need for his new career, Ricky
talks his wife, Abbie (Debbie Honeywood), into selling her car—a
decision that makes daily life a little trickier for her. Abbie has
her own version of “flexible” zero-hour contract work: She hops
all over town to care for the elderly and people with disabilities,
picking up clients through an agency that often minimizes her contact
with the families (and eats into her paychecks). Ricky and Abbie have
two children they barely see because they’re always on the clock.
While preteen Liza Jane (Katie Proctor) tries to put on a happy face,
even as she absorbs her parents’ stress like a sponge, 16-year-old
Seb (Rhys Stone) acts out, cutting class to go tagging with his
friends.

Like any good polemicist, Loach understands empathy as something he
has to earn. This early stretch, episodic and carefully observed,
successfully bonds us to the plight of the Turners. There’s an
economy to the storytelling and a affecting sting to some of the
moments the filmmaker singles out, like Liza Jane cleaning up around
her slumbering folks or Abbie fighting through her exhaustion to
express kindness to an ashamed client. And Loach locates some blessed
humor, a tonic for characters and audience alike, in Ricky’s
front-door encounters with his customers, at one point stopping the
movie cold for some amusingly heated sparring between rival soccer
fans. As usual, the director’s assembled a first-rate cast: Hitchen
and Honeywood make palpable their characters’ frustrations, trying
to hold onto hope under their occupational and professional demands.
The real find may be Stone, who perfectly conveys the pigheaded
selfishness of a teenage wiseass, while also communicating what Seb is
really rebelling against: the nonstop grind and hustle
that awaits him, should he follow the same path as his parents.

_Sorry We Missed You_ is good enough, in other words, to make one
wish that Loach knew when to say when. Ricky, his beleaguered hero,
has hitched his hopes to a sucker bet: a corporate enterprise that
feeds off his labor without sheltering him from risk. It’s a system
not so radically different from the one the filmmaker decried in his
last movie, the Cannes-winning _I, Daniel Blake_
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which depicted one virtuous man’s Sisyphean struggle against a
health-care industry all but designed to deny him the relief he needs.
Working again with longtime collaborator Paul Laverty, who also wrote
that didactic downer, Loach again piles onto his working-class
protagonists so relentlessly—turning them into everyday martyrs,
crushed into fine dust by the grinding wheels of capitalist
exploitation—that any genuine poignancy begins to crumble into
self-parody. Everything that _could_ go wrong _does_, and by the
time _Sorry We Missed You_ is literally dousing Ricky in piss, you
have to wonder if it’s really society, and not just the screenplay,
stacking the deck against the Turners.

Which is a shame, because the film didn’t need to force the
family through the worse-case wringer to sell its shrewd insights
about the mutating injustice of capitalism. _Sorry We Missed
You_ sits on a rock-solid foundation of outrage: As Ricky rudely
awakens to every reality of his new job—he can’t even bring his
daughter along with him on the deliveries because he’s still
beholden to the rules his corporate “partner” sets—what he’s
really coming to terms with is how wage slavery now masquerades as
entrepreneurial opportunity. He’s stuck forever on the hamster
wheel, a point damningly underlined by the fade-out ellipsis of the
film’s final minutes. It’s all the calculated
misfortune _around_those scenes that feels like overkill. Then again,
maybe Loach has just picked the right tool for the job. When your lone
goal is to violently stir the conscience of a captive audience, a
sledgehammer will do just fine.

 

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