If you see just one more movie this year, make it I, Daniel Blake

WITH only six weeks left in the year, there are still dozens of movies demanding your attention. If you only see one more, make it this one.

REVIEW

THE top prize at Cannes, the Palme d’Or, can be a strange barometer for movies.

For the most part, winners of this most coveted prize are deserving of the accolade but despite their high achievement in cinema as an art form, haven’t always been accessible for mass audiences.

For every Pulp Fiction, Apocalypse Now or Sex, Lies and Videotape is about five films from more challenging filmmakers such as Michael Haneke or Lars Von Trier.

Or take the 2010 winner, Thai entry Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, which featured, among other things, monkey ghosts and sex between a human princess and a catfish. Brilliant and boundary-pushing, but few people’s idea of a fun Saturday night at the cinema.

This year’s winner, I, Daniel Blake, is the kind of movie anyone (over the age of 12) can and should watch, and it won’t leave you scratching your head about what some existential or avant garde scene meant.

It is simple storytelling at its most powerful.

Daniel Blake (Dave Johns) is a widower trying to navigate the Kafkaesque labyrinth of the UK social welfare system. Dan has suffered a heart attack and his doctors say he can’t go back to work as a carpenter yet.

He’s kicked off the disability allowance after not receiving enough “points” in an arbitrary and rigid assessment. The only way for Dan to stay afloat is to try and hop aboard the cruel merry-go-round of the jobseeker’s allowance until he can get an appeal date for the disability pension decision.

A quiet and dignified performance.

While battling a system designed to crush your spirit and stomp on your soul, he meets single mum Katie (Hayley Squires), who’s just moved 400km north to Newcastle from London because that is the only place she and her two children could get housing after spending two years in a homeless hostel.

The bond formed between Dan and Katie and her family is one of the most honest portrayals of an unlikely friendship.

Ken Loach, who previously won a Palme d’Or for The Wind That Shakes the Barley, is known for his searing portraits of social realism. Here, he addresses that heartless dichotomy of the lifter and the leaner, an unkind term beloved by politicians and radio shock jocks that too easily demonise those among us that need the most help.

Dan is an everyman. He spent his whole life working and paying taxes — he has never thought of himself as a charity case and is only reaching out for help because of circumstances beyond his control. He’s never been near a computer and he just wants to get on with it.

Johns’ portrayal is potent but restrained. He plays Dan with a dignity and self-respect that commands our empathy. It’s that empathy, authenticity and lack of manipulation that makes I, Daniel Blake such a compelling watch. Only the most callous will fail to be moved by it.

Hayley Squires as Katie (second left) and Dave Johns as Daniel (right) in I, Daniel Blake film.

I, Daniel Blake is a stinging indictment of the punitive UK welfare system, a system that is supposed to help people, not make them miserable at every opportunity with a condescension that beggars belief. It treats citizens as the enemy and its processes are entirely devoid of common sense — case in point, the phone number for the service to help the computer illiterate can only be found online.

But despite its heavy subject matter and the more depressing parts, the film has a lot of heart. There is much joy and warmth to be found in the people in I, Daniel Blake. Not just the leads but the community around them, from Dan’s young neighbours to the manager of a supermarket. It’s a reminder of the innate decency in most of us.

I, Daniel Blake also gives insight into the kind of world that most middle class and well-off people have no real idea of — the absolute desperation that comes from being hungry, at having to choose between school clothes or dinner. Of good people trapped and repressed in a system that wants nothing to do with them.

It goes a way to explaining the disenfranchisement of the underclass in recent shocking political movements. But don’t worry, there are no ugly strains of nationalism on display, this is about affinity with your fellow man, all of them.

Near the beginning of the film, Dan shouts in exasperation “Can we get some perspective in here?” Perspective is the greatest gift I, Daniel Blake has to give.

Rating: 5/5

I, Daniel Blake is in cinemas from Thursday November 17.

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