Nearly every critic in town has fallen for Ken Loach‘s I, Daniel Blake, which screened yesterday afternoon at the Salle Debussy. I noticed a couple of women dabbing tears from their cheeks as I shuffled out. It’s another one of Loach’s social injustice sagas, this time about a 59-year-old carpenter (Dave Johns) who needs state assistance after suffering heart trouble and losing his job. The Cannes party line is that it’s about a poor guy being slowly strangled in red tape, but it’s also about an obstinate fellow who’s more committed to venting frustration than playing the system for his own benefit. It’s a sad tale but the world is full of guys like this.
Here’s a debate that ensued this morning between myself and a critic friend:
Me: “You need to calm down on I, Daniel Blake. He’s a carpenter, a joiner, a delicate craftsman, and a would-be employer offers him a job around the two-thirds mark and he turns it down because he’d rather just keep pretending to look for work so he can keep getting government checks?
“Don’t tell me it’s because he’s afraid that working will give him a heart attack because he’s already leading a life of considerable stress plus the anguish of feeling depressed. When he said ‘no, thanks’ to that job, I checked out. No sympathy. If his heart is going to fail anyway then it’s better that it fail while he’s working and earning a living with a sense of pride than to die a miserable government dependent.
“Plus he’s got an obstinate attitude all through the film. It seems more important to him to express indignation and loathing for the bureaucracy than to man up, play it smart and make things a little better for himself. He’s full of grief when Hayley Squires‘ Katie turns to prostitution but he can’t pick up a saw and some nails and do a little honest work?
“When poor Dan died at the end I was muttering ‘tough break and I’m sorry, but with your attitude and the state’s obstinacy things weren’t going to get any better, were they?