Review: I, Daniel Blake

Seven years on from George Osborne’s first swing of the austerity axe, countless Londoners have had their lives torn apart by bedroom taxes, benefit caps and other divisive policies. 

The tales of desperate people like these coping with increasingly desperate times are now the subject of a growing ‘misery storytelling’ industry, with Channel 4’s Benefits Street documentary, Professor Green’s Hidden and Homeless investigation for BBC3 and Clio Barnard’s Bradford-based movie The Selfish Giant among the most noteworthy examples.

So prominent have these productions been of late, in fact, that a Homeless Film Festival now pays tribute to some of the finest independent homelessness-focused works shot on an annual basis. 

But it’s only fitting that the most brutal, ambitious and controversial vision of Britain’s austerity age yet comes from one of our finest cinematic storytellers, Ken Loach, who famously shook the nation fifty years ago with the classic Cathy Come Home.

Enter I, Daniel Blake, which was guaranteed to divide opinion from its very first line:  “Daniel Blake, 59, who has worked as a joiner most of his life in the North East of England needs help from the State for the first time ever following an illness.”

The film, now available on DVD and Blu-Ray, follows Daniel as he navigates the infuriating world of job seekers’ allowances, online forms and never-ending hold music in order to secure himself financially in the wake of a heart attack which has left him unable to work. 

Along the way, he meets struggling mother Katie, who’s been displaced from her home in London by eviction and now must find a way to provide for her two children, be it through desperate or conventional measures. 

Yet despite the film earning the prestigious Outstanding British Film award at this year's BAFTAs, Loach’s latest sparked much debate from the moment of its launch last October.

For every supporter like The Guardian’s Mark Kermode branding the film as “a battle cry for the dispossessed”, there was a naysayer like the Sunday Times’ Camilla Long claiming that its narrative lacked realism, or like ex-Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith, who called its portrayal of Jobcentre staff “unfair”.

Such mixed responses will hardly surprise Loach: the director has tackled contentious issues throughout his career. Just look at Kes, which explored the impoverished lives of 1960s Yorkshire miners and was recently re-released on Blu-Ray, or most famously Cathy Come Home, his 1966 BBC documentary-play which prompted similar controversy as contemporary newspapers carried headlines like “‘Working girl’ play upsets viewers” and “This must be just about THE LIMIT”. 

In fact, Cathy bore a striking resemblance to Blake with its Katie-esque female protagonist and her tragic descent into poverty. One wonders if half of Loach’s reasoning for returning to such issues was to reveal how little has truly changed for the poorest members of society in the five-decade interim between the two films. 

Given all of this political, generic and ideological baggage which I, Daniel Blake carries, approaching the film even from the soft-lit confines of a living room might seem daunting to the average Londoner. Yet you’ll find a shockingly moving narrative which is brought to life with both sincerity and unashamed brutality by Loach and which captivates from the get-go. 

It’s to Loach’s immense credit that – barring a final, heavy-handed monologue from Katie – he manages to convey the intense emotional drama of his storyline with painful realism. Keeping his characters’ dialogue simplistic and unpretentious, he paints them with such a delicate brush that the viewer can completely believe they are witnessing events which could be playing out on the streets of London right now.

It takes an accomplished helmsman to straddle the line between realistic and openly didactic storytelling, so it’s a testament to the man’s talents that he achieves this balance near perfectly throughout the narrative.

Equally worthy of praise are leads Dave Johns and Hayley Squires, without whom the characters of Daniel and Katie would become overly pitiful and two-dimensional.  Like Cathy’s lead star Carole Joan White, they are hardly household names, but it is thanks to the conviction and earnestness of their portrayals that we come to know, care for and sympathise hugely with our two heroes within moments of their first on-screen appearance. 

Loach clearly understands this all too well, capitalising on and developing the pair’s electrically stirring dynamic throughout.  His unrelenting focus on his two leads ensures that we silently cheer as we witness their characters reach their highest ebbs in moments of hope, and that we shed a tear as Daniel lays eyes upon Katie in the darkest, most humiliating moment of her lifetime. 

This isn’t to say that there’s no room for improvement with Loach’s still-to-be-announced next project. Whilst Duncan Smith’s claims that Loach has “taken the very worst of anything that can ever happen to anybody, lumped it all together, and said ‘this is life’” are overdramatic, his assertion of Blake’s “unfair” depiction of job centre staff has greater merit.

True, Loach seems determined to avoid casting those tasked with approving or denying job seekers allowance applications as antagonists, but he only affords those staff at the job centre who do show glimmers of kindness the briefest of glimpses before they are ordered to attend to other jobseekers by their superiors.

Yet perhaps that’s Loach’s point. Based on his intricate background research, it’s easy to picture the director having witnessed countless acts of compassion overshadowed by a system which prioritises efficiency over humanity, and him trying to reflect this cold reality in the film’s structure. 

Either way, in spite of the debates about its realism and its disappointingly unsubtle final moments, I, Daniel Blake stands as one of Britain’s most memorable cinematic endeavours in recent years, a masterclass in ‘misery storytelling’. 

It’s an essential purchase for Loach fans keen to see how his vision of our financial situation has changed – or how it has stayed the same – since Cathy and, more importantly, for any Londoner wanting to better understand the social issues on their doorstep. 

4 STARS OUT OF 5 

I, Daniel Blake is available now to buy for £9.99 on DVD and £14.99 on Blu-Ray.

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