Ken Loach's "My Name is Joe" is his greatest film. He has returned to the gritty world of the earlier "Riff Raff", one hemmed in by poverty, drug addiction and slum housing. What is different this time is that he has created characters whose humanity soars above their miserable settings. Out of the depths of a mean Glasgow neighborhood Loach has fashioned a love story that is among the greatest I have seen in a movie. What gives this love story such poignancy is that while wanting to see it succeed--partly because of the charisma of Joe, the central character--one can not forget for a moment that it will likely fail because of the weight of the social conditions.
Joe Kavanagh (Peter Mullan) is a recovering alcoholic on the dole. He supplements his meager income with an odd job picked up here and there. His main passion is the soccer team he coaches, which is made up of losers like him. Not only are some on the dole, they are also petty thieves and recovering junkies. On the afternoon of a game, he runs into Sarah (Louise Goodall), a public health social worker out to visit Liam, one of his players. They argue whether Liam (Davie McKay) should stay for the interview she has set up with him, his girl-friend Sabine (Anne-Marie Kennedy) and their young child, or go off with the team. She is a bit too insistent for Joe and he says that people like her must think the sun shines out of their arses. Since he says it with a disarming smile, and since she is a trained social worker used to working-class resentment, she lets it slide.
Later that day, Joe spots her fumbling with some rolls of wallpaper that have fallen out of the trunk of her car. He stops his van and goes up to help her out. He proposes that he and a mate can come round that weekend and do the job for her, at half the price of a regular contractor. Even if the sun is shining out of her arse, she asks him with a smile.
In a classic Loach comic interlude, as Joe and Shanks (Gary Lewis), his best friend, drive out to Sarah's place to do the job, they fret over how they've never wall-papered anything in their lives. In particular they worry if a ceiling has to be wall-papered as part of the job. Of course when they step foot in the apartment, the camera reveals a scraped ceiling all set to be papered. Shanks and Joe try to con her out of doing the ceiling. Who's living upstairs, Shanks asks. A couple of students, she replies. Ah, that won't be good--students have parties and the wallpaper won't stand up to the pounding.
In the course of the job, Joe takes a tea break and joins Sarah in the kitchen. They discover that they share a love for classic rock-and-roll and quiz each other about who wrote each song that they sing to each other off-key. By the end of the afternoon, they are flirting good-naturedly with each other. When Joe and Shanks return that evening to Joe's place for a game of chess, they discuss the possibility of Joe taking Sarah out for a date. How much is a dinner nowadays, ask Joe. When Shanks tells him, Joe just winces. Shanks suggests a cheap date: why doesn't he take her bowling.
They do go bowling and this is the start of a romance between the two that is unlike any I have ever seen on the screen. While Joe is ruggedly handsome, his hair is thinning and there is a suggestion of the need for some dental work. He is turning thirty-eight and it is clear that all the years of hard drinking have taken their toll. Sarah is attractive in an unadorned sort of way, but Joe's passion for her seems more related to her honesty and warmth than her physical beauty. In their love-making scenes, there is more chemistry than in all the Hollywood movies starring Brad Pitt, Gwyneth Paltrow, Val Kilmer and Julia Roberts put together. The reason for this is that Joe and Sarah are real people who you can identify with, and real life is much sexier than the plastic fantasy-world Hollywood specializes in.
In addition to their love, Joe and Sarah share the frustrations of having to deal with Liam and Sabine, who can barely keep their family going. He had been released from jail the year before for dealing drugs and now she has picked up where he has left off. He wants her to stop dealing, but she needs the money to support her own habit.
Her supplier is a thug named MacGowan (David Hayman), who is always accompanied by a posse of hulking men in leather coats. Joe used to be in MacGowan's gang when he was on the booze, but has nothing to do with him nowadays. Unfortunately, events have conspired to bring them back together. Sabine owes MacGowan money from drugs she has shot up instead of selling on the street. He gives Liam a choice. Either Sabine will go to work as a whore to pay off the debt, or his legs will be broken. When Joe finds out about this, he goes to MacGowan to intercede on Liam's behalf. Fine, MacGowan tells him, do a couple of jobs for me and the debt will be forgiven.
When Joe decides to take up MacGowan's offer, not only does he finds himself sliding back into his old ways, he discovers that Sarah will not accept him now that he has become a gangster himself. He tries to defend himself: in his world, you sometimes have no choice. His plea falls on deaf ears and Sarah leaves him.
The clash between the hardscrabble world of survival in a Glasgow slum and the love of a man for a woman, who is not part of that world, grows out thematically from what some critics would ascribe to Ken Loach's quaintly old-fashioned notions of what movies should be about. Rather than making films about monsters set loose on rocket ships, or love affairs between people who never have to worry about where their next meal is coming from, Loach pays full attention to the lives of real people facing real economic hardship.
He is a throwback to the Depression era in many ways. His camera studies the same landscape of artists like Ben Shahn or novelists like Henry Roth. As critic David Shapiro points out in the introduction of his book on social realist art, this school's "only landscapes are at least partly cityscapes--a decaying mining village, or shacks along the railroad tracks. A variety of genre painting, Social Realism takes as its main subject certain significant or dramatic moments in the lives of ordinary poor people. The moments in their lives selected (and it is always a moment in someone's life--it is hard to think of Social Realist painting that does not include a human being) are almost always those that in some way focus on the indignity or pathos of their situation--the hard work they perform. the inadequate rewards they receive for it, or the miserable conditions they work under. There is almost always, implied or explicit, a criticism made of the capitalist system."
It is the rest of the movie making industry that is out of touch, when you stop and think about it. If the purpose of art is to stir our emotions and make us think about the human condition, Ken Loach is a bigger success than anybody. There is nothing old-fashioned about a Ken Loach movie, especially "My Name is Joe," because loneliness and economic hardship are alas very much still with us.
--Louis Proyect
(For Marxist discussion: www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
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