'The Old Oak' Review: Ken Loach's Final Lesson of Hope and Acceptance
While The Old Oak isn’t as powerful as Ken Loach’s previous two films, its lead performances from Dave Turner and Ebla Mari intensify its dramatic impact and result in a must-see.
Palme d’Or winning director Ken Loach has repeatedly stated that his latest social drama, The Old Oak, will be his final film. The 87-year-old filmmaker says he has “nothing left to direct” unless his longtime collaborator, screenwriter Paul Laverty, comes up with something relatively soon. To be fair, Loach has said everything he needs to say about how the system will always benefit the ones at the top and leave the ones with nothing in their lives to fend for themselves in socially-charged dramas like Sweet Sixteen, It’s a Free World…, I, Daniel Blake and Sorry We Missed You.
In The Old Oak, he continues what he established with Laverty in his previous two films. He chronicles the story of TJ Ballantyne (Dave Turner), a pub owner in the small town of Durham, whose lives are upended by the arrival of Syrian refugees in 2016. The movie opens through the lens of Yara (Ebla Mari), a photojournalist who photographs her arrival as racists outside of the bus threaten the immigrants with xenophobic insults and ultimately destroy Yara’s camera.
TJ, however, doesn’t like how Durham’s citizens are treating them, including his friends Charlie (Trevor Fox), Vic (Chris McGlade), and Garry (Jordan Louis), who want to set up a meeting inside The Old Oak, TJ’s pub, to set up boundaries on what the immigrants can and can’t do in “their” town. TJ does not entertain them and instead develops a close friendship with Yara, who has difficulty adapting to the harsh realities of Durham, as the community do not want to accept them with open arms.
It’s through that friendship that he decides to bridge the gap between Durham’s citizens and the immigrants by giving them free lunches twice a week in the hopes that the community will learn to accept and integrate them into the town. However, tensions rise within the pub as Vic and his bigoted friends want to preserve it as the only space where [white] ‘men can be men’ and ‘enjoy a pint in peace.’
This conflict makes up the bulk of The Old Oak, which eventually gets repetitive and, at times, manipulative. How many times can one watch the same cyclical dialogue scene in which Vic tells TJ how unhappy he is of immigrants arriving in Durham and they should ‘go back to where they came from’? He’s not the only character with this xenophobic point of view, which Loach showcases through various situations that are, at first, gut-wrenching but quickly get tiresome as you realize he doesn’t have anything more to say beyond a simplistic white man’s viewpoint on the immigrant experience and the abuse they receive from xenophobes.
Loach has always been at the forefront of social change, not only through his movies but he is also incredibly politically active, as he recently protested against the ongoing war in Gaza during the BAFTA awards with Laverty and Turner accompanying him. This strong political involvement has always made him a figure of controversy amongst the masses and he has become one of the most influential figures within the socialist movement in the United Kingdom.
But his viewpoint in The Old Oak seems too facile, particularly in scenes that require more complexity than pointing out how bigoted people are when they see people from a different race than theirs integrating themselves in the town they live in. It doesn’t help that Loach and Laverty keep introducing tensions within the community, not only in the pub but also in the school, as teenagers bully one of Yara’s children and post the video on social media, yet never expand (or resolve) upon the tensions, often showing it as a problem with no solution.
But someone has a solution to appease the tension, and that’s TJ, who understands the pain and suffering the immigrants lived through because of his own experience as someone with absolutely nothing to live for anymore. However, just like Yara, he has persevered in finding hope to a world that has never once loved him back and learns to further accept himself by accepting the people who need love the most, after losing everything in their past lives.
One of the film’s most emotionally potent scenes occurs as three young boys watch Laura (Claire Rodgerson) give a used bicycle to a young Syrian girl, wondering why they aren’t getting gifts, but the immigrants are getting everything. TJ appeases the boys in telling them that they’ve completely lost everything except the clothes on their shoulders, which doesn’t impress them much because they also have nothing in a town that impoverished itself after the collapse of its mining operations. This political texture is far more cogent than the repeated situations in which the bigoted characters complain about immigrants in The Old Oak, because Loach actually has something to say here, contrasting two different experiences (the war in Syria vs. the systemic oppression of the capitalist system in Durham) that both result in poverty and despair.
This also occurs during a scene in which Yara tends to a young girl who falls ill during a marathon from a lack of food. Yara gives her a banana, but she wants to eat something sweet. While at her home, Yara looks inside the fridge and sees there is absolutely nothing to eat, despite the angry protests at the mother kicking her out of the house. She eventually apologizes after finding out what Yara was trying to do for her daughter, and the two become friends. This scene predates the “when you eat together, you stick together” mantra Yara will adopt, and hopefully give TJ a newfound purpose to unite a community that is growing more divided as the Syrians make Durham their new home.
And it’s through that bond that we ultimately care about the characters in The Old Oak. Turner and Mari give impeccably-modulated, humane performances that isn’t afraid to showcase their more insecure, vulnerable sides as they open themselves up to each other in deeply affecting, cathartic ways. While their arc takes a more predictable route near its ending, the two give Loach’s direction a beating heart and soul, resulting in a drama that grows itself more enlightening as the two characters learn more about themselves. Robbie Ryan’s calculated camera choices always focus on them before returning to show anyone else.
The movie nicely wraps up with a moving sequence that brilliantly showcases how TJ and Yara will overcome their hardship through the power of community, strength, and resilience. This makes Loach’s final lesson of cinema one of hope and acceptance: no matter the hardships we all face, we must learn to accept one another and embrace the better parts of ourselves. As far as a final film goes, whereas Loach’s previous movies were far bleaker and angrier, ending his illustrious career on such a positive, uplifting note seems alright.