The Old Oak review: Ken Loach delivers another sturdy humanistic plea for his final film

With 15 films and two Palme d’Or wins, Ken Loach is the surprise answer to the trivia question about the record-holder for the director having the most individual efforts screened in the main competition at Cannes.

The workhorse British filmmaker has made a career largely out of sympathetically assaying the social ails and financial pressures facing the English working class. And his self-proclaimed final film, The Old Oak—which debuted on the Croisette last year, enjoyed a favorable slotting at Busan, and won an audience award at Valladolid—is a fine send-off, at least for the remaining cineastes who care. Telling the story of the social turbulence that accompanies an influx of immigrants in a small northeast England town, the movie is earnest, heartfelt, and touching—a sort of proudly unsexy piece of social realism portraiture whose delicate blend of poignancy and hopefulness mark it as a welcomely mature work.

Set in 2016, and scripted with forthrightness and precision by longtime Loach collaborator Paul Laverty, the movie opens with a group of Syrian war refugees arriving by bus in the once-vibrant mining town of Durham. Their appearance elicits some expectedly knee-jerk xenophobic responses, but also enflames tensions in a slightly more nuanced way given the economic impoverishment of the area—as certain out-of-work locals resent folks helping newly arrived “outsiders” while they struggle themselves.

Almost immediately, TJ Ballantyne (Dave Turner), the owner of the titular bar that serves as Durham’s last public gathering space, finds himself caught in an emotional crossfire. His wife Laura (Claire Rodgerson) is spearheading the town’s donation drive, which rubs friend Charlie (Trevor Fox) the wrong way. After helping young refugee Yara (Ebla Mari) get her camera fixed, TJ strikes up a friendship with her.

Yara is taken with photographs on The Old Oak’s back-room wall that sketch out an entire history of Durham. Her questions in turn inspire TJ to overhaul the long-closed back room, hook up electricity and a stove, and try to bridge gaps in his community by opening a kitchen that serves free meals to those in need, new and old alike. For a moment, the idea seems to take hold and work—until sabotage rears its head, and an act of violence threatens to tear the community apart.

Time and time again, Loach has lived out his principles. He has turned down OBE recognition, as well as major festival awards—the latter in solidarity with striking workers. This is worth noting because if his personal political beliefs have been the bloodhound’s nose that dictated virtually every long-form professional choice over the course of his career, they’ve also served him remarkably well, in the sense that their steadfastness tends to lend his lens (and collectively his movies) a certain timelessness.

While anger is present in Loach’s work, his is the opposite of reactionary filmmaking, designed to inflame; it’s openhearted and humanistic, but generally leavened with calm. It’s one of the reasons that Family Life, Riff-Raff and I, Daniel Blake—movies spanning 45 years in his estimable filmography—can play as credible time capsules of their respective time periods and also connect with new audiences as character studies.

On his 28th feature, Loach doesn’t concern himself with reaching for stylistic statement. Why would he? The relevance and universality of its narrative exists plainly on the surface. Shot on location by cinematographer Robbie Ryan—and representing the concluding chapter of his loose “Northeast England” trilogy, alongside the aforementioned I, Daniel Blake and Sorry We Missed You—The Old Oak is a good example of “meat-and-potatoes” filmmaking, wherein an authenticity of setting is established and simple but solid storytelling invites a progressively deeper sink-in with these characters and their community. The story is the thing.

If there’s a general knock, it will be that for some viewers these characters are actually somewhat two-dimensional, and rather functional. They tend to present rather directly, as they are, and the narrative then makes (generally effective) use of them, almost as pieces on a chessboard. The film blends, too, a couple professionals with non-actors, the latter of whom lend the proceedings considerable genuineness, but sometimes come across as stiff.

The element that helps hook a viewer, though, is the skillful manner in which Laverty’s script elucidates the similarities in its disparate groups, revealing to one another, and by extension the audience, that both are of course mourning different ways of life gone forever, and trying to come to terms with how to move on.

While its characters, and their various plights and epiphanies, are the main dramatic fulcra, The Old Oak also somewhat slyly reaches for and successfully imparts a deeper, thought-provoking message about our complicated relationship to both shared spaces and places with intergenerational communal value. It’s a testament to both Loach’s skill as a filmmaker and his intellectual honesty that he can allow two conflicted feelings to coexist in such proximity to one another: a sense of genuine sorrow and loss at the economic changes in life that erode tradition and community, plus a real tingle of thrill that be conjured by extending the parameters of an old space’s purpose, and giving it new life.

If The Old Oak is not a definitive capstone, in some ways one supposes that’s kind of the point. By this time, Loach’s films have a rather self-selecting audience. Unweighed down by grandiloquent gestures attempting to affirm the bonafides of its maker, The Old Oak is a reminder that empathy isn’t merely about having the ability to put oneself in someone else’s shoes and consider their perspective, it’s recognizing that one’s personal struggles extend beyond one’s own family and other people that look exactly like you.

Loach’s one superpower, undimmed by 87-plus years on this planet, lies in an unshakeable belief that, no matter their circumstances, each and every person still has the capacity to listen and grow and yield to the better angels of our nature.

The Old Oak opens in limited release on April 5.