In Ken Loach’s “Ladybird, Ladybird,” a first-time movie actress named Crissy Rock gives a performance so wrenching and emotionally naked that the barriers of the screen seem to dissolve. When Rock, with her chunky, sexy Liverpool tough-bird looks, smiles at her lover Jorge (played by Vladimir Vega), there’s an almost palpable yearning. When she screams, it’s like a furnace blast of hate.
This is great screen acting of a really unexpected kind: not the finesse of an Anthony Hopkins, the danger of a Tommy Lee Jones or the vulnerability of a Gena Rowlands (in “A Woman Under the Influence”), but something that goes beyond storytelling, that seems to be inventing itself as we watch.
And in a way-given Loach’s unorthodox working methods-that’s exactly what’s happening.
Playing Maggie Conlon, a lower-class West Londoner who loses six of her nine children to the complex British social services system, Rock-a Liverpool standup comedian with no previous film experience-pulls off a little miracle of sustained, re-created anguish. Without straining, she attains scary, fiery heights of torment and rage.
Working with the relentlessly naturalistic Loach-a genius at evoking the hurt, uneasy lives of British working people-Rock makes you understand Maggie’s horrible plight. Without sentimentalizing, she draws us deeply into the mind and heart of a woman so victimized-first by her abusive husbands and absent lovers, then by the system that’s supposed to protect her-that we see why she seemingly can’t be reached, why she keeps blowing up and fouling up her own chances.
Loach, who pioneered the style he uses here back in the ’60s, is able to suggest real purity of intent and effect. There’s a lot of seeming melodrama in “Ladybird, Ladybird”-children ripped from their parents, wild arguments, heartless bureaucrats ignoring the havoc they wreak-but it rarely seems like an invented story. It’s closer to the melodrama that can exist in real life-the show that people, hooked on TV and movies, make unconsciously of their own lives.
Maggie, who’s had four children with four fathers when the film starts, has had bad luck with men. But, in a way, the soft-spoken civil servants who arrive to help her, always restrained and tactful, are worse. Taking away her kids with court orders, they inflict much damage in her life that they drive her into volcanic fits of rage, which then justifies their appearing again later on, with more court orders, to seize another child. It’s a Dickensian nightmare, and Dickens rarely matched the towering outrage this film’s appalling story, based on fact, eventually generates.
“Ladybird” begins by showing Maggie at just the point where most other pictures would end happily: when she finally finds the man, Paraguayan emigre Jorge, who loves her unselfishly and treats her with gentleness and consideration. Jorge, who falls for Maggie when he watches her soulfully singing the Bette Midler song “The Rose” in a West End bar, is a man of sentiment-and a wounded character, just like her. But, because he’s a political refugee with a limited visa (and another wife back home), the social workers see him as another low-life, hardly different from the raffish men of her past.
And when Maggie loses control and starts screaming, their suspicions gain credence. Declared a dysfunctional mother after one of her children is badly burned in a fire when she mistakenly locks them in, she seems to confirm their harsh judgment with each new tirade. When she careens into another, the audience may start to feel helpless. Yet who can blame her? It’s that emotionalism, right under the skin, that attracted Jorge.
Ironically, in real life, Ken Loach is just as soft-spoken and reasonable-sounding as Maggie’s tormentors. If he’d cast himself in “Ladybird, Ladybird,” he would have had to play a social worker. And, perhaps because of that, Loach doesn’t portray Maggie’s nemeses as conventional villains. They’re obtuse, but they’re not cruel. And some people watching “Ladybird, Ladybird” will agree with them completely that Maggie is a bad mother.
Loach is subtler, larger. For him, it’s the system that’s wrong. Obviously, there are both class and racial biases working in the judgments against Maggie. Two of her children are mulatto and, to the well-bred, well-spoken civil servants trooping in and out, Maggie and Jorge probably seem an unpleasantly disorderly couple, no matter how well they try to act.
Loach, one of the modern masters of British screen realism, tapped a wonderful vein of Rabelaisian lower-class humor in his last two films, “Riff Raff” and “Raining Stones,” both of which are about working-class men or male groups. But in “Ladybird, Ladybird,” he’s returning to female protagonists, to the raw emotion and bleak unvarnished social statement of legendary telefilms like his “Cathy Come Home” (which stunned 1966 Britishers into a national debate on housing problems) and the 1971 “Family Life” (a devastating indictment of drug and electro-shock therapy in mental hospitals).
He’s also working in the radical improvisatory way he used in “Riff Raff” and “Raining Stones,” building on Rona Munro’s script by giving the actors their lines immediately before the scene is shot-throwing them against each other and catching the results, documentary-style. It takes amazing discipline and unerring instinct to use a style this free and bring it off. Loach succeeds where dozens, or hundreds, of experimental dramatists and filmmakers routinely fail.
But what makes “Ladybird, Ladybird” work so well-what enables Loach’s actors, especially Crissy Rock and Vladimir Vega, to bring off such extraordinary, deeply moving scenes-is the film’s strange mixture of compassion and an unsparing eye. Loach isn’t afraid to show Maggie, if not Jorge, behaving “badly” because his sense of why the system mistreats her is so clear, his portraiture so astute and lucid.
Watching this West London mother, stripped of her children, humiliated, punished repeatedly for the very warm, reckless, impulsive spirit that makes her special, becomes annihilating. The entire file reverberates with anger and sorrow, echoing the moment when, as Jorge listens, Maggie pours out Midler’s slick, sad ballad about the seed, the sun’s love and the spring as if she were flinging that spirit into darkness, heedless of the answer-even when it comes. Whose eyes wouldn’t fill? Whose heart wouldn’t grieve?
”LADYBIRD, LADYBIRD”
(STAR)(STAR)(STAR)(STAR)
Directed by Ken Loach; written by Rona Munro; photographed by Barry Ackroyd; edited by Jonathan Morris; production designed by Martin Johnson; music by George Fenton; produced by Sally Hibbin. A Samuel Goldwyn release; opens Friday at the Music Box Theatre. Running time: 1:41. Not rated by the MPAA. Language, sensuality, violence.
THE CAST
Maggie Conlon……………………………..Crissy Rock
Jorge…………………………………..Vladimir Vega
Simon……………………………………Ray Winstone
Mairead………………………………..Sandie LaVelle
Adrian……………………………….Mauricic Venegas
Jill……………………………………Clare Perkins
