My Name Is Joe

A review of this film in the Telegraph asks, "Why do people go to see Ken Loach films?" I would suggest that people go to see Ken Loach films because they're interested in society, interested in how people live, and keen to see films about REAL people i.e. people who aren't rich and beautiful and don't live in charming pieds a terre in Chelsea ... My Name is Joe is at the same time heartwarming and heartbreaking, making you feel good about the characters whilst thanking your lucky stars that you don't live the lives they do. Go and see it with an open mind and a thirst for realism.

The awesome realism of "Once Were Warriors" (New Zealand, 1994), successfully transposed to Glasgow, Scotland.

Solid, decent human beings use alcohol and drugs to "cope" with life. But, life only gets worse, loyalties are brutally tested, and one poor unfortunate will not survive. But, don't think this to be another flaccid piece of cliched, anti-drug drivel. No, this film speaks powerfully to the perverse, and often vicious, arbitrariness of life. Darwinians, of course, will be unmoved. The rest of us, however, will be chilled by the scale of our impotence in making this world a better place. Prepare yourself to feel humbled.

Joe (Peter Mullan) is a guy who has seen it all before. A former alcoholic, he kicked his habit. Now he is unemployed but is paradoxically very active since he trains a little football team and interests himself in young Liam who has a brush with the local underground for a story of unpaid drugs with his young spouse Sabine. He falls in love with Sarah, a social worker who brings them help and support. The two people fall in love whereas to help Liam, Joe is ready to break the law and to do shady jobs for the mobsters. Will his relationship with Sarah be affected by this?

When he places his camera in the popular neighborhoods of a big city eaten away by unemployment, Ken Loach is the defender of the outcasts who are very strongly linked by friendship and mutual support, like Joe here with his tiny football team. Loach refuses to feel pity for them and shots the outset of his film with energy and generosity. Where he also grabs the audience and impresses her is his master at supple cinematographic writing. "My Name is Joe" starts up first time with a humorist perspective that the filmmaker will try to keep to the maximum. You have to see Joe and his sidekick who pretend to be professional house painters to Sarah's. Then, as Liam and Sabine's trouble grow and with Joe's decision to help them, the tone becomes darker, blacker and is here to remind us that we are in Loach's universe. His characters in spite of their big efforts are caught up in a sad fate. In the end, Loach runs the whole gamut of tones with ability in a quite gloomy plot.

The arresting performance of Peter Mullan helps to make Loach's 1998 film more appealing and it's one to discover or rediscover.

As far removed from Hollywood's glamour as can come is Ken Loach's take on working-class life in Glasgow, in this film centered around a recovering alcoholic named Joe. Or rather non-working class, because the poverty and despair of the struggling late 1990s characters in My Name Is Joe feel as palpable as real unemployment. Loach describes the hopelessness of post-Thatcher peripheral Britain, much like Danny Boyle did in Trainspotting or Peter Cattaneo did with The Full Monty during the same period, only without the flashiness of the former or the bubbling positivism of the latter. Loach's characters are utterly and fundamentally sad - even when they are trying to have some fun. And since they have been in this rot for a long time, their destructiveness and, to be honest, often lack of redeemable qualities almost makes you feel they deserve their bad luck. Loach certainly gives them nothing for free.

Still, and as you may have learned by now, love has its way, and the romance between Joe and a well-doing health visitor named Sarah comes with a rare filmatic bareness and honesty. The lack of any kind of classical romanticism between them brings out another aspect: how much these two need each other; theirs feels like a romance borne out of necessity and circumstance, not plot-convenience. Like he has become known for doing over the years, Ken Loach strips his characters and environments down and presents them to us as they are. My Name Is Joe does tests the audience's zeal and goodness, but ultimately even Ken Loach rewards his most patient viewers.

First this movie seems to be much lighter than previous Loach realisations (remember LadyBird, LadyBird ?). Joe is a hell of a good guy and the other characters are as true as possible. And it is truly funny (the football matches of the "German" team are hilarious). But then, like in many of the best Loach movies, the social reality, with all its dramatic aspects, turns the end of the movie into a real tragedy. A must, in my opinion.