Gigged

Sorry We Missed You a film by Ken Loach.  Amazon Prime.  With Kris Hitchen, Debbie Honeywood, Rhys Stone, Katie Proctor.  ****1/2

Sorry We Missed You is a devastating movie about a family unlike that of anyone reading this post (since you have time to read a post on a website).  They’re trying to get by in the Gig economy, which was an abstract notion to me until I saw this movie.  What happens to them is in no way their fault.  But this movie leaves you feeling as if you’ve been kicked in the gut.

Ricky (Kris Hitchen), the father, has worked various blue collar jobs in his life, sometimes hopeful of getting ahead.  But at this point in his career, he’s decided to do deliveries for a company which does not hire him as an employee, just as someone to make the deliveries.  As his boss Maloney (Ross Brewster) tells him at the beginning of the movie, he’s now the master of his own fate; he can make as much money as he has time for, and that sounds good to Ricky.  What it actually means is fourteen-hour days of constant pressure, and no wiggle room.

Each driver has a group of packages he must deliver by the end of the day.  They’re recorded on an electronic device he carries, which also creates the route.  The only thing the device cares about is whether the package is delivered on time.  It has no idea what the driver might run into in terms of traffic and other problems.  The driver is, in effect, a package delivery machine.  He’s not a human being.

Ricky’s wife Abbie (Debbie Honeywood) also works in the gig economy, as a caregiver for homebound people.  She’s a sweet loving person, extraordinarily patient.  But at the beginning of the movie, she and Ricky make a decision that changes her life: they sell the car she’d been using so he can buy a van to make his deliveries.  He had the option of renting from the company, but financially he’s better off buying.  That means Abbie spends her days taking one bus after another, or sometimes killing time at bus stops, making the rounds to see her patients.  Her day is as long as his.  They make it home for a late dinner, collapse in front of the television and often fall asleep.  Their lives are all work.  Days off don’t seem to happen.

The children take care of themselves.  Liza Jae (Katie Proctor), who looks to be about twelve, is enterprising and self-reliant, while Seb (Rhys Stone)—a few years older—has entered a rebellious stage.  He’s obviously realized—as Ken Loach shows us in one brief scene—that his life is a dead end; if he goes to school and does everything right, what he has to look forward to is a job like his father’s.

Facing that, he and his friends have become graffiti artists, drawing on surfaces all over the city, including at least one blank billboard.  He neglects school, neglects everything, even shoplifts, to do this work, which is partly an act of social criticism, but also a real artistic outlet.  The design they put on the billboard is intricate, and Seb has a whole collection of designs in his notebooks.  When I taught young people who were Seb’s age, I often thought that, if they had one real interest, they’d make it through adolescence.  Seb has such an interest, but it’s problematic, especially when he skips school and starts shoplifting.

The bedrock fact about this family is that they love each other.  Abbie in particular holds them together with her patience and love, but all of Ricky’s hard work, the endless hours of mindless employment, are also a form of love.  Seb is rebelling against the system, and often seems angry at his parents, but it really isn’t them.  As a policeman tells him when he’s picked him up for shoplifting, this is a turning point in his life.  What he has in his favor is something “massive,” a family who loves him.  Even if it doesn’t seem that way all the time.

The problem with the gig economy is that there’s no leeway at all, to get sick, have a parent-teacher conference, go to the police station when your son’s been picked up (though Ricky makes time for that).  Abbie’s clients need care every day, and Ricky’s packages are either delivered or they’re not.  My wife thought that Maloney, Ricky’s boss, was unbelievably rigid and brutal, but this is a macho world (as we see in a simple exchange about rival soccer teams), and Maloney’s a slave to the system too.  He’s got his own electronic device, and is ultimately responsible.  He gets results by being a turd.  But he does get results.

The economy and simplicity with which Ken Loach shows us this world are remarkable.  He doesn’t beat us over the head with anything; we need just one brief scene where Ricky is nearly falling asleep at the wheel, with good reason, to show us what his life has become.  The particulars of the plot don’t seem inevitable, but if these catastrophes hadn’t happened, others would have.  The system is stacked against them.

I honestly expected another movie, a light comedy that shows how absurd the gig economy is.  What I got instead is a portrait of a family being ground into the dirt.  They did nothing to deserve it.  Just tried to make a living.