I, Daniel Blake

In Ken Loach’s latest sobering social drama, “I, Daniel Blake”, all the anger rises to the top. If the aesthetic, in keeping with Loach’s usual methods, is often muted, the rage that boils within is not. Written by Paul Laverty, “I, Daniel Blake” is a direct salvo against Britain’s benefits sanctions, against a system that has dropped the ball for those who need it most. This is not, it must be noted, an evenhanded portrayal. Only a single state employee glimpsed throughout is painted in anything like a sympathetic light and even that employee is pulled aside and lectured by a higher-up for deigning to do a good deed. But then, Loach reckons he is speaking for the common man, the one who has no voice because mostly every time he tries to use it he winds up stuck in the wilderness of automated phone lines. This is aggressive advocacy, take it or leave it.

Loach’s fictional advocate is Daniel Blake, a widowed 59 year old carpenter who has just had a heart attack as the film opens and, with danger of an arrhythmia lurking, is told by his doctor that he cannot yet return to work. Fair enough, except he fails a means test for disability benefits, which is relayed during the opening credits over black in audio only, underscoring his invisibility to the system, which forces him to apply for unemployment benefits instead. But to get unemployment benefits he has to prove he’s looking for work, which prompts a sadly comical sequence where he goes by foot from place to place, asking if they are hiring, only to be directed somewhere else, and then directed somewhere else again, a pointless loop since, of course, he can’t even take the job if it’s offered on account of his doctor, which is just the sort of efficient synergizing the powers-that-be are always blathering about, I imagine, at corporate luncheons.

Daniel Blake is played by Dave Johns, a standup comic, and that vocation is put to deft use for the part. There is anger to Daniel Blake, sure, how could their not be, but there is also a tendency in the character to try and diffuse his increasingly agonizing situation with gallows humor. When he gets sent to a resume class he ignores the lessons to crack jokes, and the more absurd his circumstances become, the more he resorts to semi-hysterical exasperation, which Johns makes hysterical no matter how depressing the context. You see this most acutely in the moments where he is forced, as he deals with re-applying for benefits, to tangle with technology.

No doubt the government is not officially ageist, yet “I, Daniel Blake” makes clear how society’s rapid technological advance has nevertheless been inadvertently ageist. Much of what Daniel Blake has to do in order to navigate the maze of red tape is tied back to computers, with which he is either unable or unwilling to wrestle. Little acts of simply clicking a mouse become herculean and are brilliantly juxtaposed with quiet moments of him carving wooden fishes.

In the course of his travails, Daniel becomes friends with Katie (Hayley Squires), a young, desperate mother of three who wigs out in the social security office when she finds herself flummoxed by the same bureaucratic rigmarole as Daniel. If eventually her character is forced to take a hard turn toward inane melodrama, very unbecoming of this otherwise brass tacks screenplay, their relationship is nevertheless the defining quality of the film, where circumstances, regardless of age, sex, or race, force people to foster their own community just as Daniel has at his apartment complex where his neighbors a few doors down invite him around to watch football matches.

If “I, Daniel Blake” is to be believed, the system is broken and few stuck within its maddening circular nature seemingly designed to drive those who need its aid to give up on even trying for that aid. Their only recourse, really, is to fall back on one another for support, whether it’s financial or merely moral, which is what happens in the movie’s most rousing sequence where Daniel inadvertently educes a small crowd to damn-the-man cheers by a graffit-ing a direct challenge to the government on its own walls. Daniel, and everyone else, however, seem to know this won’t spark change. Loach knows it too, but it’s telling that he gives his protagonist this moment anyway.

Loach is angry, but he’s still got some love in his heart. And that, in the end, is what saves “I, Daniel Blake” from simply being a furious pity party or a simple-minded screed, even if that love does not technically save Daniel Blake himself.

The Angels' Share

The title of “The Angel’s Share”, as explained in a lovely monologue, is culled from the portion of the whisky distillation process that evaporates – which is to say, it is the small share given over to the angels. Well, that’s a poetical thought, and one that speaks to the ultimate intent of the film. Its director, Ken Loach, is known for a naturalistic style, locations that feel lived-in, casts stocked with as many non-professionals as professionals, and he often uses this authenticity in service of varying social political points. But, the political is far from all Loach has on his mind, as “The Angel’s Share”, like so much of his work, evinces. It’s a film that blends naturalism with fantasy, if not always successfully at least always winningly. He wants to show it like it is, but he also wants to dream about how it might be.

Robbie (Paul Brannigan) is a young hothead in Glasgow who, as the film opens, avoids a jail sentence for a senseless beating of a stranger specifically on account of his status as a father-to-be. Perhaps, with child in tow, he can reform, and so the judge sentences him to community payback. Though he seems willing to make good, his past continually rears its head. Leonie (Siobhan Reilly), the woman carrying his child, might have faith in him, but her family does not, and when Robbie tries to visit the hospital after his baby girl’s birth, Leonie’s Uncles threaten him and chase him off. How can one change if not afforded the chance to do so?

In Robbie’s case, change will arrive, mystically, in libation form when his community payback supervisor Harry (John Henshaw), protective of his young charge but also willing to give him the necessary kick in the arse, introduces him to whisky. Well, Robbie has never tasted whisky in his life, but a few sips and he proves himself an unexpected bon vivant, an improbable track-suited whisky connoisseur. And so it is an aromatically wondrous distilled spirit that forges a new path for our wayfaring youth. This is the gray area where Loach so often excels, an ability to ground his plot in the everyday but offer a heightened plot point as the ultimate thrust of the story. Perhaps this is off topic, but it’s a style I desperately wish an American filmmaker would attempt to emulate, to willingly roll around in our red, white and blue gutter while still holding holy our highest hopes.

And so while Robbie’s livelihood is threatened and while he is held accountable by having to confront the man he nearly killed for no reason, “The Angels’ Share” still provides a magical elixir in the form of an invaluable bottle of Malt Mill Whisky that has just been discovered. Having learned the distillery process and forming a ragtag Whisky Tasting Club with a few of his community payback cohorts, the quartet, sporting festive kilts to ward off suspicion, journeys north to where the Malt Mill will be sold at auction. Posing as a group of overeager, undertasted whisky enthusiasts, they manage to secure an invite to the auction, merely means to the end of siphoning a bit of the cherished liquid to sell and kickstart their lives.

That’s Loach as a wire-walker, transforming “The Angels’ Share” into a modest and uniquely un-urgent heist film and asking for us to maintain empathy with a band of thieves. Of course, we must remember this is an English film, and the auction victor is distinctly American, a Connecticut WASP in a Red Sox cap. This, I imagine, will provide snickers all over the Isles, sticking it to the Yanks, and that’s understandable. But simultaneously, it works as a commentary about the social misfits and outcasts of Scotland taking a bit of the national pride back for themselves.

Like so many films made in and around Edinburgh and Glasgow, the accents are thick and difficult to decipher, not only at first but the whole way through. In spite of this, it never feels standoffish, and instead comes across quite universal. Your Malt Mill Whisky could be anything.