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If anything, things have got a lot worse. As the country has argued about the pros and cons (there are no pros, by the way) of Brexit, nine years of Tory austerity has bitten deeper, the divisions in the country have grown wider, lies are spread as truth and truth as lies, a serial liar, bully, racist, sexist, and thug has become Prime Minister, and Trump and Putin's malicious influence on the global political scene seeks to undermine decades of liberal and democratic advancement.
It's against this backdrop that Loach has set Sorry We Missed You. But Loach is not one, like Adam Curtis, to embark upon a grand narrative. He prefers to tell the story of, what we may very optimistically like to view as the collapse of late capitalism, using a far more prismatic and (as Mark Kermode wrote, fairly, in his Observer review, schematic) lens.
Whereas I, Daniel Blake took on the DWP and the policies of Iain Duncan Smith, Sorry We Missed You takes a look at how the gig economy promises to free us all from being wage slaves while at the same time pushing us further into penury, hopelessness, and despair. It looks at how in not legislating against the companies that operate in this inhumane and cruel manner, and allowing further deregulation (which will, surely, only increase in the case of any form of Brexit) of the delivery industry the government are implicit in ruining people's lives.
The film never ventures that high up the food chain. It doesn't follow the money. Which is one very minor criticism because what it does do it does very well. I laughed out loud a couple of times but I had to wipe tears from my eyes at least double that. Ricky (Kris Hitchen) and his wife Abby (Debbie Honeywood) live in Newcastle with their kids, Seb (Rhys Stone) and Lisa Jane (Katie Proctor).
Their dream of buying their own house was destroyed by the Northern Rock collapse during the global banking crisis of 2007/8 and Ricky lost his job as a builder to boot. Since then, he's been going from one dead end job to another, struggling to make ends meet and care for his family. The film begins with Ricky signing up to work for, sorry with, PDF. Parcels Delivered Fast aim to live up to their name and are clearly based on large parcel delivery firms like Hermes who insist their drivers provide their own vehicles, refuse to pay sick pay or give holiday, and, quite frankly, treat their staff like absolute shit.
They get to do that by not admitting their staff are, in fact, staff. The sinister term used by Ricky's boss, Maloney (a man who is proud to call himself "the patron saint of nasty bastards") is 'onboarding'. You come on board. You're your own boss. As long as you do what the company tells you to, never get sick, never have any family emergencies, never get stuck in a traffic jam, and never piss off your boss you can make good money in the gig economy.
Some do. They're the ones advocates of the gig economy keep pointing to. But those people are few and far between and they mask the true picture of eighty-four hour weeks, bullying workplace environments, and pissing in a bottle in the back of your van. A picture Loach is determined to bring in to focus with Sorry We Missed You.
Once Ricky's been onboarded, and Abby's sold her car to pay for his van, we're soon thrust into a world of parking tickets, missed appointments at his kid's schools, falling asleep at the wheel, being bitten on the arse by weaponised canines, arguing with angry clients, and, most devastatingly of all, being mugged, beaten up, and having a bottle of his own piss thrown over him.
Even being in hospital waiting to assess the severity of his injuries cuts no ice with Ricky's boss, Maloney. Ross Brewster has something of the Alan Shearer about him but his willingness to be a hard nosed bastard who shills ruthlessly for his heartless employers is actually quite chilling. Maloney can only offer Ricky sanctions and fines. Never sympathy. Never empathy. Never help. Never understanding. Never humanity.
He's all that's wrong with the country - and all that's wrong with the world. He sits in stark contrast to the compassion dished out by Abby in her job as a care worker, also as part of the gig economy. Having sold her car she travels round Newcastle wiping old people's bums, feeding them their dinner, and, in one memorable case, helping a frightened and confused old lady out of a wardrobe where she's been hiding from a man she believes, wrongly, has broken into her house.
Her promise to herself regarding her clients, "treat them like your mam", is threatened by circumstance and an uncaring and faceless chain of command to which she reports to in flustered and desperate mobile phone calls from bus shelters and on bus journeys. But Abby never loses her cool and she never forgets to be kind. Even in the most trying of scenarios.
The same can't always be said for Ricky whose punishing schedule is compounded by a string of individually testing, and collectively completely monstrous, events. Events that cause him to come to loggerheads with his teenage son. Seb has been missing school, stealing (only from chain stores, not corner shops he proudly offers), and, with his friends, spraying graffiti on abandoned billboards.
It's pretty good graffiti. Seb's a frustrated artist but, more than that, he's a frustrated kid. Having to watch his father demean himself in front of lesser men shames him and he wants more for his dad, himself, and his family than that. But in a way so familiar to many of us who found the transition from child to adult difficult he doesn't always go about things in the most sensible manner.
Little Lisa Jane, a sweet, clever, and observant, child looks at all that is happening to her family with a sadness that cuts to the very core of the soul. She's the warmth at the heart of the drama and in lesser hands the scenes featuring Lisa Jane could border on schmaltz but there's a coolness to Loach's direction, and an honesty in Proctor's acting, that renders everything both completely real and utterly poignant.
As Ricky and family lurch from disaster to mishap to accident, you could be forgiven for taking the cynical view that Loach is loading on the misery too heavily but, like Ricky himself, we need to understand that Loach, like so many of us, are so fed up of the cruelty of the ruling classes that allow this to happen. Sometimes you just need to scream out loud and tell it like it really fucking is.
In If, Rudyard Kipling wrote "if you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs" you'll be a real man, and it's an admirable sentiment. But Loach isn't dealing with stock types, he's not telling stories of great leaders able to rise above their lot and impose their will on others, and he's not painting with a broad brush. He's trying to show how real, or at least realistic, people are affected by what happens to them. What it does to them. How it changes their behaviour. How they can only grin and bear it or tough it out for so long.
Which means Sorry We Missed You can be a painful watch at times. Seeing these people who you've come to care about treated so appallingly hurts. To see them, occasionally, turn on each other instead of those who are responsible for the damage hurts even more. When Lisa Jane tells her daddy she doesn't want him to go to work because she wants things to be like they used to be and when Abby has her hair combed by one of her old ladies (who sings Goodnight Irene as she does it) it's hard not to be overcome by emotion.
As with I, Daniel Blake it's the small acts of humility and kindness that, because they stand in such stark contrast to the cruelty of a capitalist, Conservative society, cut the deepest. When a policeman who's taken Seb in for shoplifting outlines to him how fortunate he is to have a loving family when many others don't and when a lady at a bus stop asks a clearly distressed Abby if she's okay we're reminded of how humanity is supposed to work.
We're supposed to help each other, not trample each other half to death in an endless rush to accumulate ever more meaningless crap to put in the homes we hide from our neighbours and strangers in. There was plenty of sadness and there was plenty of political points made (though never party political, at least not explicitly) but there was laughter too. Not least when Ricky, a Man Utd fan, had an altercation with an angry Newcastle Utd fan in his doorway.
There were touching moments too. An interrupted family meal provided an excuse for a singalong in a van and the day Ricky takes Lisa Jane to work with him provided both cause for laughter and a chance to see how things could work if we chose to live in a better, fairer society and stopped worrying that someone down the road has a better car, a bigger television, or a nicer coat than us. If we worked together instead of in constant competition.
But, as this film shows, in the society we have chosen to live in, no good deed goes unpunished. So it's not long before Ricky is being reprimanded for allowing his daughter to ride passenger in his (own) van with him, it's not long before he's being sanctioned by a company he supposedly doesn't work for - but with, and it's not long before we tire of hearing him say that in a few months time things will start improving when the evidence in front of his, and our, eyes suggests quite the contrary.
Hitchen and Honeywood are fantastic as Ricky and Abby, Stone's Seb and Proctor's Lisa Jane are possibly even better, and Brewster's Maloney perfectly captures the aura of a man whose cruel and unforgiving nature has seen him rise to a position of comparative power and sees no motivation for changing his behaviour when it's served him so well. You could say there are similarities between him and the current incumbents of Number Ten and the White House should you wish to make the grand narrative that I've already established Loach only hints at here.
That not one single cast member has a hyperlink on Wikipedia is testament to the fact that Loach trusts in and gives opportunities to little known actors or even those who have never acted like Honeywood. It's one of the key elements that gives this film its sense of veracity but it's also provided by the overcast skies, the drab warehouse locations, and by the dialogue, dotted with swear words.
Because that's how people actually talk when they're stressed - and there are are lot of stressed people out there right now. The Conservative Party, after nine years in power, are campaigning for December's election with the slogan 'Britain deserves better' and with that, if nothing else, they're completely right. A general election is not a bespoke affair in which you can pick and choose what you want but that doesn't mean it's not imperative that you exercise your democratic right and do whatever you can to vote the cruel and amoral party of austerity, Brexit, and division out of power. A party that has done so much to destroy Britain's global image simply to save their own skin.
Ken Loach's brilliant, at times depressing, at times inspirational, and righteously angry film didn't spell that out explicitly but then it didn't need to. Loach has been doing this for a long time and he knows who the bad guys are. If you've not worked that out yet. Most likely you're one of them.
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