Ethel & Ernest (2016)

Raymond Briggs, a British illustrator, did a graphic novel about his parents and this movie was developed from that.

The ordinariness of this relationship, though, is just what makes it special. When they met, Ethel was a lady’s maid with prim, middle-class aspirations, and Ernest was a happy-go-lucky milkman, who would pass her workplace on his daily rounds. It took him mere days, after noticing the shy girl flapping a duster out of her employers’ windows, to ring the doorbell and ask her to the pictures.

By the time Britain was at war, they’d married, bought a house, and had Raymond, who was evacuated from London at age 5, much to his mum’s distress, to go and live with relatives in Dorset. They keep calm and carry on, through bombings, the war, the continued deprivation after the war, their son growing into something they are not quite sure about, and then sliding into the problems of old age and finally death.

 It’s a whole history of mid-20th-century, lower-middle-class life in England, even while it remains squarely rooted to one spot.  Briggs honored his parents by playing up their chirpy stoicism, but theirs was a generation of vast change, which we witness overtaking them without their full understanding. The backdrop to this very English mid-century marriage – soot and grit and survival, and that base note of touching bafflement.