I, Daniel Blake (M)
100 mins Jimmy’s Hall was supposed to be veteran British director Ken Loach’s final film. The 1930s-set 2014 drama about a reluctant and unlikely Irish political activist seemed like a nice summation of the filmmaker’s social concerns, from 1969’s Kes to the Palm D’Or winning The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006), but didn’t feel like a memorable final flourish.
Thank goodness then that regular collaborator Paul Laverty (Sweet Sixteen, Ae Fond Kiss) persuaded him out of retirement for one more story. For I, Daniel Blake is a bold, bravura and quite brilliant slice of British drama that’s enraging, enchanting and engrossing in equal measure.
Played by little-known stand-up comedian Dave Johns, the Daniel Blake of the title is a 59-year-old widowed Geordie joiner who finds himself sidelined by a heart-attack.
Told that his marathon days are over and that he should ‘‘stay away from Viagra’’, he is stunned when social services inform him that he’s been deemed ‘‘fit for work’’. ‘‘So you know better than the consulting physician, my own GP and the physio team?’’ he rages down the phoneline.
Desperate to appeal the decision, he discovers to his horror that involves a labyrinthine process that is not good for the heart and requires access to computer technology that’s completely foreign to him. Frustrated at every turn, he breaks when he sees a young mother of two suffering the same fate at a local branch.
Kelly (A Royal Night Out‘s Haley Squires) has shifted from London to attend Open University, but her benefits don’t seem to be travelling with her and she doesn’t have enough money for gas or food. Helping her at least gives Daniel something else to focus on as he becomes even more embroiled in a world of formal requests, sanctions and enforced CV workshops.
At once a searing social drama and Kafka-esque nightmare, Daniel Blake is not only a distillation of the best of Loach, but also a timely but grim assessment of modern day Britain’s ills.
Despite being set more than a quarter of a century after the muchmaligned Margaret Thatcher left office, this feels like a contemporary update of the sort of depressing and dark tales that ‘‘reign of terror’’ engendered.
There are moments that reminded me of 1986’s Mona Lisa and 1991’s Riff-Raff, particularly as Kelly and Daniel’s sweet and tender friendship blossoms, the pair clinging to each other as the rest of their world falls apart.
A haunting film with the message that ‘‘when you lose your self-respect you’re done for’’. If I, Daniel Blake is to be Loach’s swansong it is a fitting culmination of decades worth of searingly relevant cinematic storytelling. – James Croot