Worth: $17.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Dave Turner, Ebla Mari, Claire Rodgerson, Trevor Fox, Chris McGlade, Col Tait, Jordan Louis, Chrissie Robinson
Intro:
... there is a great simple beauty that wells up and it leaves one tearful without really analysing why one is so moved.
At the heart of all Ken Loach films is an appeal to our common humanity. But, both Loach and his long term scriptwriter/collaborator Paul Laverty, are avowedly Socialist. Their belief that ordinary people realise their power when they come together and take hold of their circumstances, is never far from the surface. Sometimes, this can feel didactic but, for the most part, the pair manage to engage our sympathies via solid believable characters rather than stagey rhetoric.
Loach has had a very long career, studded with much critical acclaim (he has won the Palme d’Or twice). He still has things to say. Much has been made of this being his last film. As he is in his late 80s, he is entitled to hang up the camera. That said, he came out of retirement before (to make the devastating critique of the new oppressions of the gig economy Sorry We Missed You), so never write him off.
This new film is set in Durham in the North East of England. This means it comes with the charming Geordie accents from that region, which some may need to adjust to. Durham was a coal mining district, and it came to national prominence in the early 1980s as a centre of resistance to the pit closures under the Thatcher regime. The locals have never forgotten both the hardship and the solidarity-informed response of that time.
The main protagonist here is TJ Ballantyne (played by Loach regular Dave Turner). He has lived a life partly marked by struggle. Now, he is just managing to run his pub – the eponymous Old Oak. This is truly a ‘local’, and it has depended on people in the area who have patronised it through thick and thin.
Though TJ may sometimes be nostalgic for past times, he is not as stuck in the past as people think. Crucially, he adapts his sense of facilitating people coming together to today’s challenges. A new challenge faces the community with the arrival of a significant number of refugees fleeing the troubles in Syria (it is sort of scandalous that this issue already feels like yesterday’s papers).
The settling of the new refugees hasn’t been well handled by central government and, as usual, it is left to people on the ground to muddle through and find practical solutions for living together. The ruling class are not usually at the forefront of such daily adjustments. Incidentally, Loach and Laverty do not let their love of democracy blind them to the facts of division within working communities. ‘Old fashioned’ racism is still there to a significant extent within a stubborn resentful minority. In a community that is dwindling or challenged economically, irrational hatred can always resurface.
It is fair to say that some scenes in the film either feel a little extraneous or underexplained (as usual with Loach, knowledge of recent English history helps). The structure sometimes feels episodic. For example, Loach doesn’t usually fade to black just because a scene can’t easily be linked to the ongoing narrative, but it happens quite a lot here.
That said, the power of his work has always been to see the strength and hope in ordinary lives and to dramatise the basic compassion that glues us together. When he hits those notes, there is a great simple beauty that wells up and it leaves one tearful without really analysing why one is so moved. The old gold still shines.
