Loach back on fearsomely complex terrain
I, Daniel Blake Cert tbc, 100 min Dir Ken Loach Starring Dave Johns, Hayley Squires, Briana Shann, Dylan McKiernan, Kate Rutter, Sharon Percy, Kema Sikazwe.
I, Daniel Blake, the new film from Ken Loach, is about a woodworker who can’t work. After a severe heart attack, Daniel (Dave Johns) has been advised by his doctor to take a break from manual labour. The 59-year-old widower should be eligible for Employment and Support Allowance to tide him over, but the welfare state shuffles him on to Jobseeker’s Allowance. Here, the thumb-felt certainties of carpentry are supplanted by vague talk of “clients” and “service users”, and the pursuit of employment becomes nothing more than a ritual to unlock the next monthly payment.
Loach’s film, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last night, is an indictment of British welfare culture very much in the footsteps (and arguably shadow) of his 1966 television drama Cathy Come Home. But, in its best moments, it’s a quietly fearsome piece of drama. The central plot, drawn up by Loach and his regular co-writer Paul Laverty, is a bleakly comic gavotte, danced between Daniel and the welfare system. There’s lots of clicking on internet forms and listening to hold music on government phone lines, which is torture for a man who describes himself as “pencil by default”. Johns, a stand-up comedian, brings a welcome comic touch to the Kafkaesque slobbery – the script is struck through with Geordie humour like mica in rock.
The side-plots are much more didactic, and grab too hungrily at pity and triumph to convince on the same, bone-deep level. A single mother-oftwo, intensely played by Hayley Squires, feels a little too nobly hopeless, while the characters she and Daniel meet during their travails fall too cleanly into compassionate human beings and winged monkeys of the Tory-run state. Still, after 19 features, Loach is still drawn to fearsomely complex terrain – and the more complex he allows it to be, the better.