It’s beyond my Ken why this won in Cannes
I, Daniel Blake (15) Verdict: Over-praised drama
WHEN Ken Loach’s film won the hugely prestigious Palme D’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, I couldn’t help thinking that the judges had done what they so often do at the Oscars: honoured the right director for the wrong movie.
Loach is a remarkably accomplished film-maker, with an amazing body of work, but this is not him at the top of his game. Which is not to say I don’t recommend seeing it.
It’s a moving film, about a Geordie joiner (the title character, played by Dave Johns) recovering from a heart attack, who in applying for sickness benefit must grapple with miles and miles of tangled red tape.
As he does so, he befriends a single mum from London (Hayley Squires), who with her young children has been thoughtlessly rehoused in a Newcastle council flat.
As poor old Daniel is thwarted at every turn, receiving only occasional kindnesses in an unfeeling world, Loach and his regular screenwriter Paul Laverty take a series of ferocious if increasingly unsubtle swipes at lowly, seemingly heartless civil service bureaucrats (the animated film Zootropolis did the same thing much more imaginatively, by representing them as sloths).
They also issue a screeching cry of pain and rage not only on Daniel’s behalf, but on behalf of all those people of a certain age who are expected to be able to operate a computer.
But this too gets a bit forced and clunky. ‘The screen’s frozen,’ Daniel is told. ‘Well, can you defrost it?’ he replies, artlessly.
Johns is a stand-up comic, not an actor, and at times it shows. But even in its slight woodenness it is an affecting performance, at the centre of a film that has been over-praised and over-garlanded, but nonetheless, unlike its hero, has a robust heart.