Ken Loach - Ladybird Ladybird (1994)

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Review (Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times)
Ladybug, ladybug, Fly away home.
Your house is on fire, And your children will burn.
- Nursery rhyme

This is the story of a troublesome woman. A woman with a big heart and a big temper, who
has had four children by four different fathers, and lost custody of all of them because
she cannot function responsibly. Or, looking at it differently, it is the story of a woman
persecuted by British social workers who slap her down every time she almost has her life
together. The strength of the film is that there is truth to both interpretations: Yes,
she is treated cruelly by social workers - and, yes, she is her own worst enemy.

The woman's name is Maggie, and she is played by a former barmaid and stand-up comic
named Crissy Rock who has never acted before. It is the strongest performance in any
film of the last 12 months; seeing the movie for the first time at the Telluride film festival in
September 1994, I walked out of the theater and saw Rock standing there, and wanted to
comfort her, she had embodied Maggie's suffering so completely. The Oscar nominations will
be incomplete if they do not take this performance into account.

If you hang around bars where a lot of steady drinking goes on, you will have met someone
like Crissy. She is short, blond, pudgy, in her 30s, with a nice face tending to fat.
She's a "character." On karaoke night, she grabs the mike and brings down the house.
She's good company, tells jokes, gets bawdy, holds her own.

She likes to laugh, but there is sadness inside, and after too many drinks she may start
to sob. She's in the bar looking for comfort, reassurance, a sense of belonging, and so
she's a pushover for guys who buy her a drink and seem to care.

One night she meets a man who really does care. His name is Jorge (Vladimir Vega),
and he is an immigrant from Paraguay with "political problems" at home. He seems almost
improbably nice, and for once she dares to hope: Maybe this man will treat her better than
the others, who were abusive, irresponsible, drunks and dopeheads. He watches her singing,
and is attracted to her spirit. Soon they are a couple, and she begins to hope.

We see how hopeless she is as a mother - as a responsible adult. She was abused as a
child, never learned basic survival and social skills, and exists in chaos, moving from
one flat to another, treating each meal as a fresh challenge, as if food itself baffled
her. We see her exploding; she has a fierce temper, a knack for blowing up when she
should lay low. One day she does something that is shockingly irresponsible, and her four
children are taken away from her by the social workers. She deserves to lose them. But
because Ladybird, Ladybird sees her so clearly, we can understand why she acted as she
did. Not forgive, but understand.

Now starts her long ordeal. She wants her children back, but sees the photograph of one of
them in the newspaper, offered for adoption. Jorge sticks by her, and soon she is pregnant
again, but now the social workers watch her like a hawk, and she loses that baby to them -
and then another, in a scene where the social workers enter the maternity ward and all but
rip the infant from her womb, while a nurse breaks down and sobs.

To witness Crissy Rock in these scenes is to see acting of such elemental power and truth
it can hardly be borne. She screams, she cries, she rages against her fate. The rawness of
her need and grief is like an open wound. And yet at the same time we acknowledge that she
seems unfit to be a mother, although perhaps Jorge could make a new start for her, and his
sweetness and good sense could teach her hard lessons of maturity and balance.

The social workers are monstrous precisely because they seem to apply rules without any
regard for the human beings in front of them - and yet we can see their reasoning, as
Maggie explodes again and again.

She is white, her children are of various races, and now her new husband is a foreigner
with questionable British immigration papers; the workers never say anything overtly
racist, they are too correct for that, but sometimes you can guess what they're thinking.

Ken Loach directed the film. After 25 years of specializing in working-class British life
(Kes, Poor Cow), he has recently made a cluster of particularly fine movies:
Riff-Raff, about the floating population of construction workers; Raining Stones,
about an unemployed man trying to buy a communion dress for his daughter, and now
Ladybird, Ladybird, which could have been a predictable tear-jerking docudrama, but is
too honest to stack the deck. What we see here is not a "problem," not a "solution," but
simply a painful record from life. The movie is "based on a true story." I never doubted
that for a second.

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Monday, May 31, 2010

Ken Loach - Ladybird Ladybird (1994)

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