“The Old Oak”: the audacity of hope
“The Old Oak” is named for the pub where much of its action happens — an old drinking hole in a village outside Durham, England, that’s seen better days. Its back room, once a gathering place for the miners and their families who populated the town a generation ago, has been locked up for many years, fallen to disuse. Its walls are still hung with photographs of those miners taken during the lengthy strike of 1984-85, a labor effort that ended without the resolution the miners sought and with weakened trade unions. But during the action, the village marched in solidarity — at least for a while — and came together to share meals in that back room, to support one another, a point of pride for the men who were children back then.
When the movie begins, it is 2016, the year of the Brexit vote. It’s hard to imagine that kind of unity happening any more. The village has slowly emptied out, closing down places like the church hall, which had been a gathering spot. The village’s real estate is being bought up at auction by entities abroad, driving down the value of houses owned by locals, leaving them with nothing to live on in old age. Jobs are scarce. Money is tight. Children barely have enough to eat. And so in the Old Oak, a handful of regulars sit around, bitterly decrying the state of things.
They have lately found a target for their rage: a few families of Syrian refugees who have been settled in the village, helped along by a local charity worker named Laura (Claire Rodgerson) and Tommy Joe Ballantyne (Dave Turner), who goes by TJ and owns the Old Oak.
He’s the one who has to listen to the regulars gripe and spew racist epithets about the refugees, always clarifying that they’re “not racist.” He says nothing. He doesn’t think he can. He needs their business to scrape by. He knows their private lives are no picnic either. And if the pub isn’t there, they’ll just go home and wind one another up on the internet anyhow.
But TJ is lonely, and cares about the newcomers, though he’s afraid at first to become too involved with their lives. He strikes up an unlikely friendship with Yara (Ebla Mari), a young Syrian woman who speaks English, having learned after two years of volunteering with nurses while living in the refugee camps. Yara has arrived in town with her mother and several younger siblings. They don’t know where their father is because he was taken from them by the Bashar Assad regime. Her life has been worse, by any measure, than those of the men in the pub — but it feels almost obscene to make the comparison.
You’d know “The Old Oak” was directed by Ken Loach (from a screenplay by his long-running collaborator Paul Laverty) even if his name wasn’t in the credits. His late work is unmistakable, driven by fierce moral clarity and outrage on behalf of the people whom capitalism and Britain’s government, supposedly constructed for citizens’ benefit, have left behind. His previous film “Sorry We Missed You,” for instance, is a blindly infuriated (and infuriating) film about a father who takes a job as a delivery driver to make ends meet, only to discover that everything about this job is designed to prosper the owner but ruin his life and his family.
Loach’s style remains forthright, even blunt, with few cinematic flourishes (though it’s still beautiful, shot by the great Robbie Ryan) and with a secondary cast largely made up of nonprofessional actors. This can make his movies feel like cudgels, but in “The Old Oak” it works brilliantly; at moments, I caught myself thinking I was watching a documentary. The film isn’t based on any single true story, but on many, including those shared by the Syrian refugees who were settled into the poorest towns in northern England. Loach makes a conscious choice to resist constructing shots which might direct us to think of characters as demons or angels, a matter-of-factness that suggests that while these people retain individual moral agency, it is limited and constrained. They are players in a production where they don’t get to write the script, which doesn’t absolve the racism and inhospitality but does provide some clarity on where it’s coming from.
Midway through “The Old Oak,” TJ and Yara have cooked up a plan to build connections between the Syrians and the villagers. (Don’t worry: this is not some easy, Hollywood ending.) “This is about solidarity, not charity,” TJ explains, and I have been thinking about that line for days. It perfectly encapsulates what “The Old Oak” understands and what so many similar films miss. Charity sets up an inherent power differential: those who have, giving to those who don’t. It is a necessary part of creating a functioning society.
But a much stronger and more lasting force is solidarity, a unity built on common interests and objectives. In “The Old Oak,” a bit of charity is possible — resources brought in from churches and labor unions that have money and goods to spare. For the villagers, though, resources are already scarce. The memory of solidarity, however, runs through their veins, even if it’s been lost in their hometown’s decay. Recapturing it will change how they live together.
Will that fix their problems? No. It won’t, and Loach and Laverty know this. In place of magical thinking and a happy ending, “The Old Oak” serves up something harder: a meditation on hope. “I have a friend who calls hope obscene,” Yara tells TJ. “Maybe she’s right. But if I stop hoping, my heart will stop beating.”
Yara’s way of hoping lies in looking through her camera lens, a tool that, since before the camps, was her way to see the world differently. And everyone in town, captured through Yara’s camera, suddenly sees themselves differently: not as the selves they project onto social media or in gripe sessions, but as bearers of dignity.
Loach, who is 87, has said “The Old Oak” might be his final film. So it’s not hard to see what he sees in Yara. Her discussion of hope, of a camera as a tool to spot strength in those who are usually passed over or objectified, sounds as if it might be a thesis for his own life and work. Hope can seem obscene. But when it ends, so too does the life of the world.