Fitting squarely among his semi-annual Leftist treatises on the British working class, to the point of echoing his 1990 breakthrough Riff-Raff, Ken Loach's The Navigators is about as close as he comes to boilerplate. A grimly deterministic study of railway workers, leavened by his keen ear for salty comic dialogue, the film puts in a good day's labor and clocks out, satisfied with a job well done. Yet it's these same workmanlike qualities that bring integrity and force to an otherwise predictable scenario, because Loach's abiding connection with his characters seems more genuine and empathetic than that of any other contemporary filmmaker. In the opening scene, The Navigators introduces an argument against the privatization of the railroad companies and then rigs the story to support it, measuring the human costs of businesses that care only about the bottom line. Loach's machinations are even more transparent than usual, yet the effortless naturalism of the dialogue and performances, to say nothing of the authentically gritty railyard conditions, makes every contrivance he can imagine seem utterly plausible. The film opens in South Yorkshire in 1995, when the British Rail has been sold off in pieces to private companies, which promptly throw out the old agreements on safety and benefits in an effort to win low-bid contracts. Though the battle-weary crews snort at all the corporate propaganda videos, with their friendly-sounding phrases about being "partners in progress" and "laying the foundation for the future," they lack the leverage to do anything about it. The companies want to start on a "clean slate," but for the workers, that means their years of steady service have been erased, making their jobs unstable and open to dangerous compromises. Forced to take freelance assignments from an agency, one man (Thomas Craig) gets frozen out for complaining about safety violations, while another (Joe Duttine) tries to earn a living wage under the burden of child-support payments. More so than in most Loach films, the individual characters are given short shrift in comparison to the collective, which makes some of the domestic situations, however effectively handled, seem like an afterthought. But Loach steers clear of outright didacticism (his occasional Achilles' heel) by smuggling commentary in raucous bits of blue-collar humor. (A sample exchange between management and the workers: "Deaths have got to be kept at an acceptable level." "What's acceptable?" "Two deaths per year." "Any volunteers?") The Navigators ends with a long-anticipated exclamation point, but as a filmed editorial, it earns its points with remarkable, clear-eyed veracity.