My Name is Joe
Directed by Ken Loach
In the three decades that film director Ken Loach has steadfastly championed the British working class, his work has lost none of its sting. His latest offering, the simply named My Name is Joe, depicts life in the slums of Glasgow without sentimentalisation or any sense of being contrived.
The plot interweaves a simple love story with the brutal realities of poverty. But it is not all cut and dried: the viewers are left pondering how they would fare in a similar situation.
My Name is Joe chronicles the tribulations of Joe Kavanagh (Peter Mullan), a badly damaged alcoholic who's been on the wagon for almost a year, but needs more help if he's to put his life back together. Living on the dole, Joe throws his energies into coaching a soccer team of wisecracking, unemployed youth who are more adept at stealing new uniforms than playing the game.
Joe's "special project" is baby-faced Liam (David McKay), who's the only decent player on the team and an ex-junkie and a father. Joe's other opportunity for redemption comes in the form of Sarah (Louise Goodall), a plucky public health counsellor whose neighbourhood clinic is overwhelmed by needy clients.
Joe and Sarah soon hit it off, but complications set in. Liam's wife has found herself in debt to the local drug dealer (an old acquaintance of Joe's) who threatens to break Liam's legs if he doesn't cough up. Joe steps in and agrees to do a couple of drug runs to pay the debt.
Things get messy when Sarah finds out. The viewer's sympathies are divided between Joe and Sarah, but, while not wanting to give anything away, don't expect the standard Hollywood resolution.
My Name is Joe is an entertaining and thought-provoking film that provides a dose of stark reality. The humour and tragedy are presented without a whiff of melodrama and will leave most viewers with a sense of disquiet.
As usual, Loach gets all the physical details right: the dim light in the bowling alley where Joe takes Sarah on their first date, the ill-fitting suit and unsociable actions of a welfare bureaucrat snooping around the neighbourhood for petty violations, and the weary faces in the waiting room of Sarah's clinic. Loach extracts stunning acting efforts from the three leads; Peter Mullan won the best actor award at Cannes in 1998 for his performance.
The strength of the film, which is a scathing critique of an economic system that makes a healthy society impossible, is its presentation of how unemployment and crime develop from one to the other. The rampant individualism in post-Thatcher Britain is held at bay only by family and friendships remaining strong.
The Scottish-accented English is subtitled, a reminder that only those who speak the Queen's English can rise to the position of the most prominent character in the film, the middle-class public servant, whose words are not subtitled.
My Name is Joe leaves the viewer with many questions about the role of the individual in society. It does not explicitly blame capitalism for the working class's woes but, using the Fred Patterson principle, it simply presents the characters' social reality from their point of view so the viewer is left with no doubt as to where to lay the blame.