The Old Oak: Ken Loach's Last Film Frames Racism at its Most British with a Glimmer of Hope
By Chris Knight
Rating: A-
Ken Loach is retiring. The British director has been making movies since Poor Cow in 1967, many of them written by Paul Laverty, who has joined the director on 14 of his 26 films including his latest, The Old Oak.
Loach has announced his retirement before, and he’s not the only filmmaker to do so — I’m looking pointedly at Steven Soderbergh, and pleadingly at Woody Allen. But he’s 87 now, so it might be time to believe him. That said, if he never makes another movie, The Old Oak is not a bad swan song.
Dave Turner, and Ebla Mari break the ice in The Old Oak.
The title is the name of a pub, one of those stalwart British establishments where the beer is warm because they like it that way. The setting is “the North of England, 2016.” (The film was shot in Murton, near Newcastle.) And the topic is racism at its most British.
Not that the characters in the film see themselves that way. All they know is their town has fallen on hard times, and they’re not sure if they can handle the arrival of a busload of Syrian refugees, which is where the action kicks off.
Bartender Tommy Joe Ballantyne (Dave Turner, who’s had small parts in some of Loach’s other movies) is, crucially, no different from the rest of the townsfolk. But when newcomer Yara (Ebla Mari) comes to him with a broken camera, something clicks between them.
He helps her get the camera fixed. He shows her pictures of the town when it was home to a thriving but dangerous coal mining industry. (Yes, we can be nostalgic for the bad old days.) And he begins to realize that spending time with these immigrants can be a good thing for all involved.
Loach (and I should include Laverty in this assessment) has always had a unique talent of making movies that illustrate human warmth without ever sliding into the maudlin. What’s more, he can deliver a lesson without ever being didactic. And he can make us cry.
Read out interview with Ken Loach
The Old Oak is no exception. If you’re aged and British (or, like me, aged-and-British-adjacent) you may see shadows of yourself in the townsfolk who claim to speak “the Queen’s English” while using words like “nowt,” and who say they understand the travails of immigration because “me father was Irish.”
It’s important to note that racism doesn’t get “solved” in this film. There remains a great deal of mistrust on either side (the very fact that I’m talking “sides” speaks volumes) and there are characters who will never be more than mildly civil to one another.
But The Old Oak is adamant that change is possible. And that the tiniest step forward is just that — forward. When Yara visits Durham Cathedral, built a shade under a millennium ago, the Muslim woman is in awe of the Christian edifice, and is reminded of a temple in her homeland, “built by the Romans, and destroyed by the Islamic State.”
She asks: “What will Syria be like in a thousand years? How many years to cut the stones, to lift the weights, to imagine the light? How many brilliant minds? How much sweat? How many people working together? Such a beautiful place. It makes me want to hope again.”
They’re not the last words of the film. But if The Old Oak is indeed the last film of the master, it’s a fitting sendoff for a director whose work will continue to echo for at least as long as Durham Cathedral has been standing.
The Old Oak. Directed by Ken Loach. Starring Dave Turner, and Ebla Mari. Opens April 5 in Toronto, Ottawa, and Vancouver, with other cities to follow.