
Sorry We Missed You 3 stars
Sorry We Missed You is last year’s crusade film showing the perils of the working class in Britain by Ken Loach, who must be the hardest working director that you’ve never heard of. Loach has a long history of empathizing with working people in his movies going back to the sixties. In this film we follow Ricky and Abbie, a couple struggling to get by with their two children in a rented apartment. Ricky has been working odd jobs since the crash of 2008 and thinks he has found an opportunity as an entrepreneur operating as an independent delivery driver of parcels. He is lured in by the prospect of being his own boss and making his own decisions as opposed to working as an employee at a large business. He is told that he won’t work for his boss, but with him. He won’t receive wages, but fees since he is his own boss. Of course he will have to buy his own delivery van, so Abbie will have to sell her car that she needs for her job as an in home care person. She can just take the bus instead. And he is expected to meet a delivery schedule that is near impossible as he deals with traffic, ungrateful customers and fourteen hour-work days. The supervisor turns out to be a first class asshole who only cares about the bottom line and has no sympathy for what the workers or contractors are going through in their personal lives. The movie is an indictment of the gig economy that has become more prevalent in the last decade. It’s a way of reducing the income and benefits of the working poor while also placing all the risk on the workers. From the beginning the viewer knows what is coming as circumstances get progressively worse for this family as they struggle to work the long hours, raise their children and suffer setbacks not of their own making. There isn’t much plot other than that, so there is not a lot of drama to the story. It really feels more like a documentary that doesn’t have a satisfactory ending, but it certainly makes its point.