The Old Oak
Ken Loach, 87, is the director of “The Old Oak,” which is set in Durham. The pub is the last public space that everyone has staked a claim on before it shuts down. It may also be Loach’s last film and if so, it feels like a summation. This movie is as absorbing, thoughtful, angry, hopeful and just plain useful as anything he’s done, if this is goodbye, what a note to go out on.
There are always scenes in a Ken Loach film where a group of locals gathers in some shared space to argue about issues that affect them all. In this case the space is the bar itself (owned by TJ Ballantyne, played by Dave Turner), who helps out with a local charity run by Laura (Claire Rodgerson) that supplies donated furniture and other household items for Syrian refugees from the war. TJ a tender but depressed man who lost his wife and son decades ago and dotes on his little dog has grown increasingly disillusioned with his core group of patrons: men his age who blame immigrants for declining living standards that can be shown to have pre dated immigration by years if not decades or longer. There’s even an upstairs back room filled with old labor struggle pictures from when TJ was still young and Durham was a coal town.
The movie starts, like many Loaches, by dropping you into the middle of something: A busload of Syrians has just arrived in town and are being abused by white locals (some of whom apparently aren’t even from around here; hate tourists). One new arrival is Yara (Ebla Mari), a teenage would be photojournalist who shoots on 35mm film. She documents her family’s arrival along with its being harangued at their temporary housing by xenophobes telling them to go back to a war zone they’ve already given up on (Yara’s dad is missing and presumed dead); one of the bullies steals Yara’s camera, turns it on the newcomers and then drops it gleefully on the pavement when confronted.
This sets up Yara’s relationship with TJ, which becomes the spine of “The Old Oak” and knits together or tries to knit together various other story strands, and also the divided community. He takes her upstairs into his back room (which hasn’t been used in decades due to plumbing/electrical issues) and gives her a new-old 35mm camera from a collection that once belonged to his late uncle, who took pictures of the town’s mining heyday that hang framed on the walls.
The film luxuriates over those pictures at its leisure, it lets TJ give Yara a history-of-Durham tour through time and space as they look at them. You get a sense here of both the weight of history (always a factor in any Loach movie, whether fantasized nostalgically or falsely fabricated, or based on something real like this one) and also of how ephemeral today can be. So begins a simple, beautifully written story made up mostly of two-person scenes that just talk around different aspects of what this town is like right now.
Like always, Loach and his long time collaborator Paul Laverty (unjustly unsung next to the director) write representative characters whose types feel real and specific, and then they turn them loose, to behave as they would if they lived, even if that means stepping on each other’s toes or crashing into each other in anger. One of the marvelous things about “The Old Oak” is how it lets us see and feel everyone’s thoughts, including the thoughts of characters who just want human beings to aim their nameless grievances at who are wrong on the merits.
Take Exhibit A: The locals who blame immigrants for a slow economic death brought on by ruthless corporations and the post-Thatcher government not immigrants. Among Charlie’s first round of gripes is that local houses have been bought up cheaply by faceless foreign corporations looking to rent them out or turn them into Air B&Bs; nobody from any of these companies has even bothered to send a human being into town to look at the properties they’re hoovering up.
Meanwhile he and his wife scramble to pay for basic upkeep on their own house. They’re stuck economically unable to stay put or sell. You get where Charlie’s coming from when he starts getting mad and casting scapegoats about with wide nets that catch everybody from newcomers themselves to anyone trying to smooth their resettlement.
On its face it is unfair that anyone should be mad at TJ and Laura for bringing donated goods over for war refugees (they show more Christian values than those xenophobes and racists who deride newcomers’ brownness/Muslimness/terrorist-ness). But still you can understand how white citizens of Durham would resent their own kind helping out new arrivals while they slog through a life that isn’t as bad as what people are being forced to abandon but ain’t no joke either.
Yara takes a white teenager back home after she collapses from hunger during a school sports day. Tara goes into the girl’s family kitchen to find her food and learns there is almost none in the cupboard or fridge. TJ and Laura give a little Syrian girl a bike while three local boys watch. TJ explains that it’s an old bike which was donated, but the boys aren’t interested in hearing that one of them says he too wants a bike. No one in this scene is wrong. There’s just a lot to work out, and what needs working out is bigger than any person present can see or know about.
When working together, Loach and Laverty have a set of values that they work with for all their projects. They are socialists who believe in community and government responsibility towards each other. They define this against the narcissistic ruthlessness of capitalism and its corrupted and captured governments, which they also tie to a Christian-ness that is increasingly marginalised and mocked.
Durham was organised around the local church not just as a religious function but because the buildings themselves were physically connected to the community through the workers who built them. The church is still there, but it’s an abstraction for most characters now; TJ hasn’t set foot inside it in many years. The decline of the church (which had its own problems) accounts for why The Old Oak has become such a valuable/fought over meeting spot.
Loach’s movies named after bars always had a spiritual dimension, though it wasn’t foregrounded like this before. It’s expressed here not only through arguments/monologues about moral duty to those less fortunate, but via scenes of people getting together and doing something helpful taking a mattress up three flights of stairs for a newly arrived family, throwing a massive potluck dinner that will introduce the refugees to their neighbors. These outreaching gestures form new relationships that represent what used to be the economic safety net but can’t replace it because individuals don’t have the power of governments.
All throughout his career, Loach has told stories using real locations and some nonprofessional actors, encouraging improvisation among them as well, they’re taken from contemporary or historical events that affect the everyday lives of working and/or struggling people (these are not movies where billionaires fly to Norway on private jets to plot corporate takeovers; nor are there genre movie elements like horror/sci-fi/film noir etc). The camerawork (overseen here by Robbie Ryan) aims at capturing moments between individuals or groups rather than making statements on its own; the aesthetic is as rigorous in its way as any you see from filmmakers who are more ostentatiously formalist in their approach.
There are echoes of kitchen sink realist or social-realist playwrights like John Osborne (A Look Back In Anger) and Arthur Miller (All My Sons, Death Of A Salesman) in scenes that delve into TJ and Sora’s friendship, the pain of their pasts, the quiet tragedy of their stories and those of all the other characters going largely unremarked upon by the wider world. Several of them echo one of the signature speeches in Death Of A Salesman, by Linda talking about her salesman husband, Willy: “Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper.
He’s not the finest character that ever lived. But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He’s not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person.” This is an entire movie full of Willy Lomans some more likable than others, all worthy of attention.
The exercise appears like an actual event documentary on which a camera is coincidentally present. It’s like you’re truly getting a piece of life. Frequently in Loach films, it’s a bitter part. This is not true with “The Old Oak,” a drama that rushes through many unsettling or devastating moments but allows the characters to come out with tatters of optimism about what may be ahead.
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