Review by Reece Beckett
Coming hot on the heels of I, Daniel Blake (2016), Ken Loach’s most commercially successful film aside from the now-classic Kes (1969), Loach decided to turn his attention to a new problem facing working class people. Loach has always been recognised and acclaimed for his focus on the everyman, and Sorry We Missed You is no different, with the focus of the film honing in on a working class family of four who find themselves in a situation of great financial and emotional stress.
The primary focus of the film is placed on the shoulders of Ricky, the father of the family who finds himself seduced by the appealing idea of becoming a so-called “self-employed” delivery driver after having been laid off from his job as a construction worker. As soon as Ricky first attends an interview about the job, it becomes apparent that something isn’t quite right – there seems to be an endless list of rules to comply with, incredibly harsh expectations and above all else a shockingly low pay, placing these drivers in a position of financial fragility and offering a sliver of hope for stability so minuscule it may as well not even exist in the first place. Despite his doubts and finding himself determined above all else to find himself a job that enables him to spend more time with his family, Ricky takes the job and soon starts delivering.
Meanwhile, his rather stable family unit begins to crumble somewhat. Ricky’s wife Abbi works as a nurse, spending her time with the elderly. This is also a low wage job, but Abbi is such a humanitarian that the pay doesn’t factor in to her choice of job much at all – so long as she can survive, she doesn’t mind. Their teenage son, Seb, is also having some issues in trying to find his identity. He finds himself often skipping school, choosing instead to go out with his friends (one of which will soon be leaving to move away, leaving him in an emotionally vulnerable position) and to practice his self expression via art and graffiti, spraying his thoughts and feelings onto walls for the world to witness. Meanwhile, their younger daughter Liza struggles with sleep and anxiety due to the family’s chaotic housing situation ever since the financial crash of 2008 left them in debt.
The family can just about hold themselves together, but all starts to fall into disequilibrium when the promise of decent pay and more time to spend freely reveals itself to be nothing more than an insidious smokescreen that makes way for incredibly wearing work and the extreme hours required just to break even on petrol costs and to pay for the rent on the van bought to make the job possible. It isn’t long before each individual’s problem spills out and finds itself poisoning the stability of the family, and the foundations start to rot away. Soon, the family finds itself trying to establish any kind of balance, finding themselves increasingly desperate in an attempt to glue back together the life that they had before, but Ricky’s desperation to escape the debt that he feels responsible for blindsides him to the dangers he is putting himself into.
The performances in this film are just breathtaking. Not that this should be a surprise – let’s not forget that Ken Loach consistently uses non-actors and always manages to pull incredible performances from them. It also seems that the problem that many had with I, Daniel Blake – that the characters weren’t given enough depth, and therefore the only reason that people really cared for them was because of the situation that they were placed in – has been avoided here, as all characters are given plenty of time to develop as individuals, and the family core at the centre of the film is also developed to such a point that many of their seemingly small gestures become huge. Loach always does a good job of using microcosms his work, using something small to represent something much bigger, and in this film he uses this technique on a number of different levels. Here, Loach chooses to focus in on one family as opposed to making a film with a much larger scale focused on the self employed delivery drivers issue as a whole. He also focuses on the mundane, using small actions to function as huge moments – even simply taking a key or drawing on a picture can become so important in the film, as the audience is able to understand the implications of these gestures on the larger scale.
The inspirations for this film are also really interesting. Of course, Loach remains very much inspired by many of his British kitchen-sink realism contemporaries and maybe even some films from the more modern wave of American mumblecore films, but he also shows quite a lot of influence from Robert Bresson’s masterpiece, L’Argent (1983) throughout, whether it is reflected in the moments of quiet calm or the overarching focus on a society turned far too transactional for its own good.
Really, Seb’s art sketchbook sums it up quite nicely when it poses the question “Who cares?,” clearly referring to the modern age’s lacking of focus on people as individuals with lives to uphold, choosing instead to focus solely on profits and exploitation. Ken Loach proves that he cares, despite his lacking budgets, by making films that truly observe these problems from the perspective of the working class family, a perspective too often ignored in service of instead looking up to and admiring those who manage to do well in these same situations. Loach’s film is truly upsetting and really quite sickening, but it is his passionate observation of these vile problems that is really quite hopeful; our voice can still be heard, and so long as our voice is heard, change can still be made. His treatment of his characters is beautiful, even if many of the moments that unfold onscreen are quite off-putting and harsh. What this film may lack in thematic or formal complexity, it more than makes up for in genuine emotion thanks to its brilliant characters and its bravery in pointing itself so head on towards an issue that needs to be discussed before it grows even worse.