I, Daniel Blake
Ken Loach’s grey tale of an out-of-work carpenter cut down by ill health and welfare red tape took the top honour at Cannes.
Ken Loach is still angry. Bitterly angry. After 50 years and 30 films, the British director’s essayistic, polemical bite remains so palpable that any discussion of his work can barely stray from the political. He is cinema’s great cattle-prod pamphleteer. With I, Daniel Blake, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year, we find him back atop the upturned soapbox, bullhorn hollering. Look here, he intones, this is what’s going on.
The city is Newcastle. The down-andouter is Daniel (Dave Johns), a man so modest that he admires planks of wood. “She’s a lovely piece,” he says, thumbing the grain. He is a carpenter, though a heart attack has stopped him working. Without an income, he turns to the state. Daniel’s condition is assessed by a “health practitioner” who, over the phone, asks only 15 questions – “Can you lift your hand above your head as if putting on a hat?” – before turning down his disability benefit.
For 35 hours a week, Daniel is expected to pass around a handwritten CV to employers he can never work for – a kind of enforced begging – and he returns to a plain, damp council flat bereft of furniture, all sold because he can’t afford the power bill. Every lost battle ends with Daniel, head in his hands, muttering “for f---k’s sake” as if we hadn’t already grasped the gravity of this cruel and unusual punishment. This is the safety net of Austerity England – a ruthless apparatus of sneering gargoyles and condescending androids breathtaking in their inadequacy.
It’s not all sledgehammer didactics. Loach and frequent writing collaborator Paul Laverty have keen ears for the intimate humiliations and glanced embarrassments of this desperate, fraying existence: the jaunty, taunting helpline hold music as Daniel awaits another rejection. Single mother Katie (Hayley Squires) having to shoplift tampons and deodorant because the food bank doesn’t stock them, or gnawing an apple because there’s only enough dinner for her children. Endless queuing. The steely upper lip and sharp robot bob of a benefit-withholding tyrantess whose weaponised catchphrase “That’s not good enough” inflicts more damage than any insult. These are thumbscrew enormities. Explicitly painful minutiae.
Even humour – forgiving and humanising as it always is – becomes neutered. The jokes are our gentle introduction to the characters and, later, a test of the film’s effectiveness. If you can, pay attention to your fellow filmgoers. Laughter’s patter will fade out after a while. We realise that they were never jokes to begin with, just resigned
pleas for meagre attention. A grasping for humanity. I stopped laughing before the halfway point. After that, only tears.
The tears come because Loach has such a masterful grasp of his art that we have no choice but to allow the film’s rising, cumulative power to seize us. His technique is unadorned and delicately deliberate. Every inch has purpose, with no flashes of misplaced style or garishness (though a mention of former Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith does feel a little forced). Loach’s social realism is not a deceptive tool – fiction masquerading as documentary – but a way to heighten, focus and underline the withering condition of his characters.
Indeed, what wounds us most is the inflicted futility – the sheer pointlessness. Give Daniel a patch of forest and, in a fortnight, he could build you a Georgian mansion. Yet towards the end, he is in rags, a shell of a man, browbeaten and wasted like all the other hollowed figures of Loach’s films.
They never change and can’t improve, even as new scenery wheels past them. They were once a grubby working class living amid the whir and clunk of midcentury machinery, with its soot and engine oil and solidarity, but today form an unemployed underclass selling cheap trainers from a car boot outside incorrectly named Jobcentres. Their terraced family homes gave way to graffitied grey estates with three-legged grey dogs sniffing the alleys. Only the Daniel Blakes of the world remain, fixed in a squalor not of their own making.
Ultimately, the tears come in full flow because what we’ve seen is unavoidably real and piercingly necessary. Loach insists – no, demands – that as we drive home from the theatre we give more thought to the millions without even the price of admission for I, Daniel Blake to their names.
IN CINEMAS OCTOBER 27
Ultimately, the tears come in full flow because what we’ve seen is unavoidably real and piercingly necessary.