Newcastle. After recovering from a heart attack, woodworker Daniel Blake is faced with a bureaucratic heart attack: his doctor forbids him to work, but the British Government's Department for Work and Pensions refuses to pay him social welfare and orders him to get back to work. Daniel appeals, but has to wait in the meantime without any income. He becomes friends with Katie, an unemployed mother of two who moved from London. Daniel helps her repair stuff at her new home. Katie finds work as a prostitute and refuses to quit even after Daniel tells her to. Computer illiterate, Daniel has a difficult time at the employment center and attends a CV workshop. While seeing a lawyer to help him in his case, Daniel suffers a heart attack at the toilet and dies.
The movie that secured Ken Loach a second Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival, "I, Daniel Blake" is a standard, schematic and grey social drama, but it has moments of freshness due to the humorous, energetic and measured performance by comedian Dave Johns in the title role. The director Loach often copes with his didactic preaching of themes "eating" his entire story, style and creativity, and some of these flaws are apparent even here, especially in the banal, unsatisfactory and abrupt ending which feels as if it is creating some sort of apotheosis of tragedy for the title hero broken by the system. Nonetheless, Loach crafts a film that is as unglamorized from Hollywood idealism as possible, establishing a realistic and grim picture of everyday working class, who are just one health problem away from bankruptcy. The best bits in the film are those where Daniel does something funny or rebellious which makes him stand out: for instance, in one sequence at the unemployment office, when he spots the unemployed single mother Katie with her two kids treated poorly by an official, even though they are new in town, Daniel stands up: "Who's first in this queue?" A man answers: "I am". - "Do you mind if this young miss signs on first?" Daniel then points with his finger: "Now you can go back to your desk and let her sign on and do the job that the taxpayer pays you for! This is a bloody disgrace!" An official warns Daniel that he is making a scene, but Daniel insists: "She's out of the area. She's just been a few minutes. Can you not let her sign on?" In another wonderful scene, Daniel is ordered by the unemployment office to attend a CV workshop, where a man holds a lecture: "Costa Coffee advertised 8 jobs. Do you know how man applications they got from that? Over 1,300. So, what does that mean?" Cue Daniel not missing a beat: "We should all be drinking a lot more bloody coffee... Well, if you can count, it's obvious. There's not enough jobs. Fact." An ambitious, intelligent and humane film about the madness of bureaucracy in modern times and ever growing financial crisis which is taking a toll of ordinary working people, whose lives keep shrinking.
Grade:++
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