Alex Heeney reviews Ken Loach’s film The Old Oak, a warm, heartbreaking film that may not reach the highs of Loach’s best work, but it still energizes you to leave the cinema and make the world a better place.
Never miss a great film again. Get exclusive content and hidden-gem recommendations you won’t find on the website.
Click here to sign up for the Seventh Row Newsletter.
Notwithstanding Ken Loach’s previous film, the tragic masterpiece Sorry We Missed You, few filmmakers have the ability to talk about difficult social injustices with enough humanity that you leave feeling hopeful even if the latest battle wasn’t won. A former Labour Party member, his films have often been about the Solidarity movement amongst British union workers and working-class people. The Old Oak is a warm, heartbreaking film that may not reach the highs of Loach’s best work, but still leaves you energized to leave the cinema and make the world a better place.
Thirty years ago, in Land and Freedom (1995), he drew a direct line between the British Labour movement and solidarity with the republic in the Spanish Civil War, in a story about a young man who heads to fight for freedom in Spain, armed with nothing but ideals. That war was lost, but even that film is a call to arms (much like Mike Leigh’s version, Peterloo) to do what you can to stand in solidarity with others. Land and Freedom would have won the Palme d’Or that year if it were up to me.
In The Old Oak, a former British mining town, now rife with poverty and unemployment in a post-Brexit world, struggles to cope with a deluge of Syrian immigrants whom they see as a threat to their barely remaining privileges as the old white working class guard. TJ (Dave Turner) owns the last remaining public gathering space in town, the dilapidated pub The Old Oak, where locals gather to spout xenophobia and drown their sorrows. After a chance encounter with a young Syrian photographer, Yara (Ebla Mari) whose camera was unceremoniously smashed as soon as she arrived in town, TJ must decide whether turning the other cheek to keep his business alive is worth hurting the newcomers in town.
When the local charity that’s been distributing clothes and food to the newly arrived refugees gets the idea to hold community meals, The Old Oak is the natural setting for it. As TJ recalls, during the mining strikes, it was also a gathering place to show solidarity by sharing meals. Isn’t welcoming immigrants who have even less than the poor townspeople a logical extension of that? The only problem is that the meeting space they want to use is no longer insured and is full of barely-contained hazards.
The film is schematic enough that you can probably fill in the plot details of what will happen, how tragedy will strike, and how, nevertheless, once solidarity is formed, it’s a strong thing. I don’t mean that as a snub on the film; Paul Laverty’s blunt force political scripts tend to be effective when mixed with Ken Loach’s humanism. In the end, though, the film is about quiet moments shared between people who see each other as being at loggerheads, and those that lend a helping hand when they have nothing to lend at all. The bond between TJ and Yara is lovely and helps them both get through tough times, for a while anyway.
If The Old Oak is, as Loach has been threatening, really Loach’s final film, it will be a strong summation of his work: a film about community and solidarity in places you wouldn’t expect from people who can barely care for themselves. Like I, Daniel Blake, it often falls into the tropes of trying so hard to remind us that the Syrians are the Deserving Poor, rather than deserving of human rights regardless of their character. But it’s a warm film about good people doing their best to make a harsh world a little better, often at a great personal cost, and even when it’s not sustainable. Every little bit helps. But I hope we’ll get more from Loach, one of Britain’s best and most essential filmmakers.
Related reading/listening to our review of Ken Loach’s The Old Oak
More Ken Loach: Read our review of I, Daniel Blake. Listen to our podcast on Sorry We Missed You and Peterloo. Listen to our forthcoming podcast on abortion in British New Wave films, featuring Ken Loach’s Up the Junction.
