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With The Old Oak, Ken Loach Goes Out on a Hopeful Note
In the director’s final film, the people of a dying English town and a group of Syrian refugees discover they have more in common than they realize.
The pub’s owner, T.J. Ballantyne (played by Dave Turner, a retired fireman who belatedly began acting after consulting on Loach’s 2016 film, I, Daniel Blake), is himself the child of miners — he lost his father in an accident many years ago — and he’s one of the few in the village who don’t yell expletives or throw dirty stares at Yara (Ebla Mari) and her family as they arrive by bus in this strange new place. As the guy who dutifully serves pints to whoever comes into his bar, including a gaggle of old chums who spend all day working themselves up into a lather about the immigrants invading their shores (they’re like a soused Greek chorus from hell), T.J. clearly doesn’t want to put himself out there one way or the other: “I say nowt, just keep me mouth shut,” he tells Laura as they drive around town in his van dropping off charity supplies to needy families. The Old Oak(which was written by Loach’s longtime collaborator Paul Laverty) completes a loose trilogy of works that began with I, Daniel Blake, a slow-burn drama about the Kafkaesque bureaucracy of Britain’s failing social safety net, and continued with 2019’s stomach-turning look at the gig economy, Sorry We Missed You, which followed the increasing humiliations faced by a middle-age e-commerce delivery driver.
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