Movie Review: Sorry We Missed You

Sorry We Missed You **** / *****

Directed by: Ken Loach.

Written by: Paul Laverty.

Starring: Kris Hitchen (Ricky), Debbie Honeywood (Abbie), Rhys Stone (Seb), Katie Proctor (Liza Jae), Ross Brewster (Maloney), Charlie Richmond (Henry), Julian Ions (Freddie), Sheila Dunkerley (Rosie), Maxie Peters (Robert), Christopher John Slater (Ben), Heather Wood (Mollie), Albert Dumba (Harpoon), Natalia Stonebanks (Roz), Jordan Collard (Dodge), Dave Turner (Magpie).

 

Ken Loach has made a career of making movies about the losers of capitalism – the ones left behind or exploited by a system designed to make a lot of money for a few people, and leaves the rest of us poorer. Many of those films. Paul Laverty has been writing those films for Loach dating back nearly 25 years now, and together, they have created quite a long resume of films about the underclass in Britain. At their best, they expose something deep and dark – and come the closest modern films to gets to the post-war Italian neo-realists films of Vittorio De Sica, and others. Often though, they feel like route and by the numbers – as if Laverty and Loach find the issue they want to explore first, and then shoehorn in a story that they can make work. Despite the fact that it won the Palme D’or a few years ago (the second Loach/Laverty film to do so), I, Daniel Blake felt like that a few years ago. Their latest however, Sorry We Missed You, feels vital and alive – and really is one of their best, and certainly their best since at least The Wind That Shakes the Barely (2006 – which was the other film to win the Palme).

 

Kris Hitchen stars in the film as Ricky. He’s married to Abbie (Debbie Honeywood), who works as a homecare work for seniors and the disabled – and doesn’t get paid nearly enough for what she does, and the long hours she has to keep. They have a teenage son – Seb (Rhys Stone), drifting down the wrong path, and a younger daughter, Lisa Jae (Katie Proctor), who just wants the family to be happy again. Ricky has worked all kinds of construction jobs over the years – but is tired of it. He wants something of his own. So he ends up signing up with a package delivery service (think Amazon) as a driver. They are not employees – but independent contractors (that means, no guaranteed pay, not benefits, no time off, etc.) You can rent the truck from the company if you want – but that eats away a lot of your daily profit. So Ricky buys a truck he cannot really afford, thinking it will be better in the long run for him. He then starts having to keep up an insane route, which makes him work longer hours than ever before, for a foreman Maloney (Ross Brewster), who looks for any reason he can to ding you – mounting up fines and penalties, that of course, eat into your pay. The company is making a fortune of course – but Ricky cannot get ahead.

 

Loach depicts this family with great sensitivity, and great humanity. They are all doing their part to try and get by – maybe even trying to get ahead. Seb is the rebel – hanging out with his friends, who spend more time doing graffiti than attending school, which will end up hurting the family more and more as the movie goes along. But Seb isn’t doing all of this to be selfish – he’s doing it because he sees no future for himself. He can go to school, but there will be no jobs for him when he gets out, and he’ll be in mountains of debt. So he can end up working like his dad has done, and he’s miserable. Hitchen is great as Ricky – who just gets up every morning, and trudges into work, goes on his route, and tries to make it through to the next day. Even his few brief moments of joy – like the weekend day he takes Lisa Jae with him, are undermined, because he’s not allowed to bring her, and gets in trouble. He is essentially stuck on a hamster wheel – running and running to keep up, if he stops, he’ll be flung off. Abbie is the same – Ricky sold her car to buy the truck, so now she has to take the bus everywhere. She sees people who are neglected and forgotten about by their own families – and isn’t given enough time to properly care for them. But she has to clock in and clock out on time – no overtime allowed.

 

Sorry We Missed You ends up being one of the great depictions of the gig economy we’ve seen on film so far. It is about the disconnect between those doing the work, and those making the decisions (and the money). Maloney is the films de facto villain – but even he really isn’t to blame. He’s just another cog in the machine. If he has to monitor all the drivers to make sure they’re doing what they should be, someone else is monitoring all the depots like his, to make sure he’s doing what he has to. Everyone has to keep running, or get left behind. Loach can sometimes lay things on too thick, or go too far with speeches, or a parade of misery. Here, he gets the balance just right.

Movie Review: I, Daniel Blake

I, Daniel Blake *** ½ / *****

Directed by: Ken Loach.

Written by: Paul Laverty.

Starring: Dave Johns (Daniel), Hayley Squires (Katie), Briana Shann (Daisy), Dylan McKiernan (Dylan), Kate Rutter (Ann), Sharon Percy (Sheila), Kema Sikazwe (China), Steven Richens (Piper), Dan Li (Stan Li), John Sumner (CV Instructor), Dave Turner (Harry Edwards), Micky McGregor (Ivan).

 

From the beginning of I, Daniel Blake, there is no doubt who the director is. This is Ken Loach’s second film to win the Palme D’or – after 2006’s The Wind That Shakes the Barley – and it falls neatly in line with the other films the 80 year old Loach has made over his 50 year career. The Leftist directors career has always been as messaged based as anything else, which has resulted in a career that has produced some truly great films, and others than feel like halfhearted sermons standing up for the little guy. When Loach marries his style with the right story, the results can be great – although too often over the past 20 years or, the message gets in the way. Luckily, for the most part I Daniel Blake is one of the Loach films that doesn’t overwhelm its narrative with its messaged, even if the message is front and center from beginning to end. The film goes overboard in the final act (no more so than in the final scene), but by then, Loach has earned his sermonizing I guess, by delivering a thoughtful, emotionally wrenching film.

 

The story follows the title character, played by Dave Johns, who is a 59 year old construction worker and widower, recovering from a heart attack. His doctor has told him he isn’t well enough to return to work yet, and to do his exercises, but to basically rest up and get well – he’ll get back soon enough. But Blake has trouble navigating the byzantine, Kafka-esque government bureaucracy to get his benefits. He’s supposed to be on disability, but someone known as the “Decider” has decided he doesn’t qualify anymore. He can appeal, but that takes time – and until then he has no benefits. He can apply for regular unemployment – but in order to qualify for that, he has to be actively looking for a job, and be able to prove it. Adding insult to injury, he’s supposed to do all of this online, but he doesn’t own a computer, and has no idea how to use one. One day at the government office, he meets Katie (Hayley Squires), a single mom new in town. She was “relocated” when her landlord threw her out for complaining about a leak that made her son ill. Now, she’s in an area where she knows no one, has no support, no job – and two kids to feed. She was late for her appointment because she just arrived in town, and got lost. Both Daniel and Katie end up getting thrown out of the office that day, but have to keep coming back to try and survive.

 

The first hour or so of I, Daniel Blake has a neo-realist feel to, and Loach follows Blake and/or Katie through their increasingly desperate day-to-day lives, as they become frustrated, or try and do what they are told to keep receiving their benefits. Even when Daniel does find a helpful work at the assistance office, he ends up getting her in trouble as she helps him fill out his forms, which she isn’t supposed to do. Meanwhile, he has to apply for jobs he doesn’t want, and cannot accept, because he needs to show he’s trying. And Katie is becoming increasingly desperate and poor. There is no romantic relationship between them – Loach isn’t that hackneyed – but a genuine friendship where they help each other other. The performances by Johns, and especially newcomer Squires, really are quite extraordinary in the way they inhabit these normal people, without ever condensing to them or the audience.

 

The movie does lose its way in the third act a little bit, as it starts to lay everything on very thick during the last 40 minutes or so., I’m a little tired of every attractive, younger woman with money problems becoming a prostitute right out of the gate at this point, and the finale – including a speech by Squires that she saves from being embarrassing – is way too on-the-nose to be effective.

 

Yet, the message of I, Daniel Blake is an important one, and for the most part, it is delivered in an effective way by Loach and company. The movie could have – and should have – trusted the audience a little bit more to get the message of the movie (even in the first act, it’s not very subtle – we certainly didn’t need to get beat over the head with it). Still, flaws and all, I, Daniel Blake is a fine film – Loach’s best in a decade – and a story that really does hit hard.

 

Note: There was quite a bit of controversy at Cannes a year ago when the film won the Palme D’or, despite generally mixed critical reviews, while a film as praised as Toni Erdman went home empty handed. Like Jacques Audiard’s Dheepan – which won a couple of years ago, I do think that giving I, Daniel Blake the Palme considering the competition (not just Toni Erdman but Paterson, Personal Shopper, American Honey, The Handmaiden and Elle – and those are just the ones I’ve seen and loved) is silly, but hardly reflects on the film itself – which is strong, just not a masterpiece. I fear that, like what happens at the Oscars when a good film beats a great film for Best Picture, all of a sudden the good film seems worse than it actually is.

Movie Review: The Angels' Share

The Angels’ Share
Directed by: Ken Loach.
Written by: Paul Laverty.
Starring: Paul Brannigan (Robbie), John Henshaw (Harry), Gary Maitland (Albert), Jasmine Riggins (Mo), William Ruane (Rhino), Roger Allam (Thaddeus), Siobhan Reilly (Leonie).

Through more than 40 years, and nearly as many films, Ken Loach as been the U.K. preeminent Leftist filmmaker – making films about social justice and the underclass whether they were fashionable at the time or not – and he has gone through long stretches of his career when both of these things were true. You have to admire that Loach has stuck by his beliefs throughout his entire career. He hasn’t always made good films – some are far too preachy, some like his last film Route Irish were muddled and confused. But he has stuck by his core beliefs. You have to give him that.

His latest film, The Angels’ Share, which won the Jury Prize at Cannes last year, is similar to many of his other films. Once again, Loach is looking at the underclass – this time at Robbie (newcomer Paul Brannigan), a young man with seemingly no family, who likes to get drunk and get into fights. But now he wants to turn over a new leaf. His girlfriend Leonie (Siobhan Reilly) is pregnant, and he wants to be more of a father to his son than his father was to him. But he is stuck in a cycle of violence that he may not be able to break free from. His girlfriend’s father hates him – beats him up, and tells him to stay away from his daughter and grandson. He even attempts to buy Robbie off – and most astonishingly, seems to have renamed Robbie’s newborn son. Robbie also has a long running feud with another local drunk – stretching back to his father’s days, and while Robbie wants to bury the hatchet, this other guy doesn’t. The smartest thing Robbie can do is get out of Glasgow. But how? And what will he do when he does? Besides, he’s 300 hours of community service to go through.

It’s at Community Service where he finally discovers his purpose. He meets Harry (John Henshaw), responsible for overseeing the assorted people working. He treats them kindly and with respect – assuming the best about them. And he is proven right. It seems that none of the people at community service are really that bad – they’ve just made mistakes. Harry’s greatest love is Scotch – not to get drunk, but to simply savor the flavor. It’s this love that sets up the film’s second half – that you could describe as a comic caper, when Robbie and his pals decide to steal a few bottles of the most expensive, rarest Scotch on earth.

The Angels’ Share – which refers to the 2% of Scotch that disappears a year while it is being aged – is a strange movie. On one hand, it wants to be a hard hitting movie about Robbie, who is basically a good guy, who wants to set his life straight, and how because he is poor, and has no way out, he is trapped. On the other hand, it’s a comic caper – almost wish fulfillment – about Robbie and his pals conspiring to get out of their dire circumstances by stealing whiskey. These two sides fight with each other – often scene to scene – and so the movie never really settles into a groove. It’s hard, if not impossible, to get on the film’s wavelength, because it switches every few minutes. It’s hard to think of a more schizophrenic film in recent memory.

It should be said though that in Brannigan, Ken Loach has discovered a major talent. This was his first film role, and although the movie makes him change rapidly and constantly, he mainly succeeds in grounding the movie. The scene where he has to go meet the young man he beat up – and his family – is heartbreaking, precisely because Brannigan seems so natural and ashamed, although he doesn’t say anything. He also has charm and comic timing, which the movie requires in its last half. He is a star, if he’s given the right role.

Perhaps Loach and his constant writer Paul Laverty – who have worked together on every film Loach has made since 1996 (that’s 12 films if you’re counting), should start working with others more often. Since Loach’s triumph – The Wind That Shakes the Barley in 2006 (for which he won the Palme D’Or, although I suspect that the honor was almost more of a lifetime achievement award than for the film itself), their collaborations seem stuck in some sort of rut. With The Angels’ Share, they are obviously trying to change – make a comic caper, with a mix of the social realism they are known for – but it quite simply doesn’t work.

DVD Review: Route Irish

Route Irish
Directed by: Ken Loach
Written By: Paul Laverty.
Starring: Mark Womack (Fergus), Andrea Lowe (Rachel), John Bishop (Frankie), Geoff Bell (Walker), Jack Fortune (Haynes), Talib Rasool (Harim), Craig Lundberg (Craig), Trevor Williams (Nelson), Russel Anderson (Tommy), Jamie Michie (Jamie), Stephen Lord (Steve), Najwa Nimri (Marisol).

Note: This review was written within days of my seeing Route Irish at TIFF in 2010. As far as I know, the film was never released in North America - and yes, there is a reason why-, and is just now getting a DVD release - so I thought I'd post this.

There are few directors as socially conscious as Ken Loach. For the past 40 plus years, Loach has been making films, and all of them have a political bent to them – for him politics and cinemas are forever entwined. It was only a matter of time before Loach turned his camera onto the Iraq war – in fact I am amazed it took him this long to finally do a film on it. I am also surprised that Loach decided that this was the story about Iraq he wanted to tell – a Death Wish type thriller.

The movie opens with Fergus (Mark Womack) at the funeral of his best friend Frankie (John Bishop), who was killed along “Route Irish”, a highway leading to the Baghdad airport in Iraq. Frankie worked for one of those “private security firms” operating in Iraq, and was only there because Fergus had convinced him to sign up and come with him. But while Fergus was safely back in Ireland, Frankie was still there when the jeep he was riding in explodes, and he gets killed. From the eye witness reports, Frankie was just “in the wrong place at the wrong time”.

Fergus refuses to accept this line of reasoning though, and wants to know everything about what happened to his friend. His interest becomes more intense when get a cell phone delivered to him that Frankie wanted him to have. On that cell phone is a video in which an innocent Iraqi family is gunned down by someone else working for the security firm, as Frankie tries, and fails, to stop it. Does this video have anything to do with Frankie’s death? Is there some great conspiracy within the security firm that wanted Frankie dead so he couldn’t tell what he knows? What do you think?

It takes Fergus about half the movie to unravel the plot and swear vengeance. The film then devolves into a series of scenes in which Fergus tracks down the people responsible for Frankie’s death and makes them pay for it – including one memorable scene where he water boards someone (which apparently they really did to poor actor Trevor Williams when they realized that simulating water boarding didn’t look real enough).

I’m not sure what it was about this story that Loach felt that he needed to make. He has made thrillers before sure, but this one seems a little too rudimentary for his tastes. Yes, he gets to get his political points in – making the corporate war machines the bad guys – but that’s a little too obvious isn’t it? He doesn’t really dissect either the war, or these corporations, in any meaningful way.

Yet, once I got past the idea that Loach was going to do something more intelligent, and simply gave in to the Death Wish like theatrics of the film, I did find myself enjoying it a little more. Mark Womack may give a one note performance in the film – all righteous anger – but he holds the screen with a commanding presence. The film has many memorable images – not just the water boarding, but other acts of violence as well.

It’s just that I expect more than this from Loach. I expect something more intelligent, a movie that actually has something to say, and I don’t think in Route Irish that he really has anything. It’s like he felt he had to make a movie on the Iraq war – everyone expected him to do it years ago – and jumped onto the first project that allowed him to do so. Route Irish certainly is a horrible film, but it’s not all that good either.