Few subjects trouble film-makers as much as poverty. Go too far one way and you are accused of romanticising hardship; head in the opposite direction and you’re poking sticks at poor people for entertainment. At one extreme, “we were poor but happy” feelgood films such as The Full Monty and Billy Elliot; at the other, television’s Benefits Street. Recently we have seen Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma praised as an apologia for his own privileged upbringing but also criticised for making its servant heroine an opaque, passive character with little in the way of an inner life.
Even Ken Loach, the UK’s patron saint of working-class strife, was accused of overdoing it in his 2016 film I, Daniel Blake by, you know, making the lead characters decent human beings rather than thieving, lazy degenerates who deserved their fate. “At no point do we see him drinking, smoking, gambling, or even watching television,” complained professional non-poor person Toby Young of Daniel Blake. “He is a welfare claimant as imagined by a member of the upper-middle class metropolitan elite.” Loach: know your place!
This is what makes a film such as Richard Billingham’s Ray & Liz so exceptional. It is unashamedly a portrait of white, West Midlands poverty in the Thatcher-era and, on paper, ticks many of those poverty-porn boxes: drinking, smoking, obesity, neglect, tattoos, council-estate squalor. And, for good measure, it features Deirdre “White Dee” Kelly, of Benefits Street fame. Toby Young is going to love it.
But Ray & Liz is no gratuitous wallow; it is authentic, sympathetic, lyrical, keenly observant and richly detailed. It often takes the children’s point of view but it doesn’t judge its flawed grownups. Ray and Liz were Billingham’s real-life parents, whom he has documented in various forms over the past 20 years. He broke through in the 1990s art world with a photo series about them (he was working at Kwik Save at the time), and Ray & Liz is effectively a moving-image reconstruction of those images, and of his own childhood. He tells it like he saw it.
Occasionally, others have done the same, and British cinema is all the better for it. Terence Davies’s Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes, for example. Or Gary Oldman’s shocking Nil By Mouth, based on his own violent, boozy south London roots. In more recent times, we have had the films of Andrea Arnold, Lynne Ramsay, Shane Meadows, or Paddy Considine’s Tyrannosaur (one to go back to for Olivia Colman fans). And, still going strong after half a century, good old Loach. Like Billingham, these were people who lived that life themselves, then gained access to the tools to put it into a film. Maybe it’s the difference between turning your own life into art and turning someone else’s life into entertainment.
