Ken Loach - My Name Is Joe (1998)

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Review (Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times)
His name is Joe, and he's an alcoholic. He's only been sober for 10 months, and although
AA advises against romance in the first year of recovery, Joe falls in love with a nurse
named Sarah. She's a social worker who has seen a lot of guys like Joe, but there's
something about him -- a tenderness, a caring -- that touches her.

They're both wounded and cautious, but a romance slowly grows, at moments like the
one where he invites her in for tea and plays some classical music. He explains: In his
drinking days he stole some cassettes and sold them, but the classical tape didn't sell.
One night he got drunk and played it, and "it was just lovely." Joe is played by Peter
Mullan, who won the 1998 best actor award at Cannes. He's a compact, ginger-haired man
around 40 who moves with a physical efficiency that suggests he's focused and impatient.
He looks a little like Paul Newman, with the same slender energy. He doesn't have work,
but he manages a soccer team and picks up the members in a city van, fussing over them
like a brood hen. He wears a windbreaker and sneakers, and is always in a hurry. And he
takes his newfound sobriety seriously (the opening scene shows him telling his story at an
AA meeting).

Joe lives in a rough neighborhood of Glasgow, where drugs and crime are a way of life. One
of his friends is Liam (David McKay), a kid who did time for drugs. Liam's wife, Sabine
(Anne-Marie Kennedy) dealt while Liam was inside, but now he's out and, Joe thinks, clean
and sober. But it's not that simple. Sabine is using, and they're into the local druglord,
McGowan, for a total of 2,000 pounds. McGowan's thugs have offered to break Liam's legs,
and nobody thinks they're kidding.

My Name Is Joe takes these elements and puts them together into a story that forces
Joe to choose between the 12 steps of AA and the harder, more painful steps he learned on
the street. In theory, a recovering alcoholic doesn't allow himself anywhere near drink or
drugs. But McGowan offers Joe a deal: If he makes two trips up north and drives back cars
containing drugs, Liam's debt will be forgotten. Why doesn't McGowan simply have Liam do
this? Because McGowan isn't dumb. He knows Liam can't be trusted -- and he also enjoys,
perhaps, compromising a community leader who no longer adorns McGowan's pub.

The film is another one of Ken Loach's tales of working-class life; like Riff-Raff, it
is told in a regional British accent that's so thick it has been subtitled. (I understood
most of it when I saw it without subtitles in Cannes, but I have to say they help.) His
screenplay is ingenious in bringing together the romance, the crime elements, and the
challenge of being sober in a community where drink and drugs provide the primary pastime
(and employment).

The romance is all the more absorbing because it's between two street-wise people in early
middle-age, who have no illusions. The nurse, Sarah, is played by Louise Goodall with a
care-worn face but a quick smile; she's had to harden herself against the sad cases she
encounters as a community health worker, but she's able to be moved by Joe's spirit and
sincerity. I have made the film sound too depressing, perhaps. It is about depressing
events, but its spirit is lively, and there's a lot of humor wedged here and there,
including a walk-on for a bagpiper who knows three songs, plays them and then peddles
shortbread to tourists. And there's humor involving the soccer team, their bad luck and
their uniforms.

Often with a film like this you think you know how it has to end. The ending of My Name
Is Joe left me stunned. I've rarely seen a film where the conclusion is so unexpected,
and yet, in its own way, so logical, and so inevitable.

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Monday, May 31, 2010

Ken Loach - My Name Is Joe (1998)

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