Family Life (Blu-ray Review)
- Review Date: Jun 02, 2025
- Format: Blu-ray Disc
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Director
Ken LoachRelease Date(s)
1971 (November 19, 2024)Studio(s)
Kestrel Films/Anglo-EMI/MGM-EMI (Indicator/Powerhouse Films)- Film/Program Grade: A-
- Video Grade: A
- Audio Grade: A
- Extras Grade: A-
Review
A despairing, disturbing but extremely well-crafted drama, Ken Loach’s Family Life (1971) is about a 19-year-old woman’s struggle with mental illness, and how both her judgmental and controlling parents and the Britain National Health Service so spectacularly fail her as to ensure her inability to recover. Loach’s signature jumble of professional actors and nonprofessional amateurs in key roles lend the film a semi-documentary quality more “real” than most filmed drama. It’s closer to Frederick Wiseman’s great documentary Titicut Follies (1967) or John Cassavetes’s A Woman Under the Influence (1974) than, say, Miloš Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975).
Nineteen-year-old Janice Baildon (Sandy Ratcliff) lives with her conservative, working-class parents (Bill Dean and Grace Cave). Though she’s hardly a swinging London-rebellious type, her Mum and Dad act as if she were, browbeating Janice at every opportunity. When she becomes pregnant, her parents—typically contradictory in their behavior—condemn their daughter’s sinful pregnancy while also insisting she have an abortion, a procedure they find so morally objectionable the mother won’t even allow the term to be spoken in their home. For her part, Janice wants to keep the baby, but her mother is particularly manipulative and determined to always have her way, even while simultaneously complaining that Janice should act more independently.
The mother gets her way, and the already fragile Janice falls into an even deeper depression. The exasperated parents push Janice into voluntarily committing herself to a psychiatric hospital, where empathetic Dr. Donaldson (Michael Riddall) quickly identifies the root of Janice’s problems within the Baildon home, but in a political move by the hospital board, his progressive treatment ward is shut down, he’s dismissed, and Janice’s treatment is shifted over to Dr. Caswell (Alan MacNaughtan), who favors old school debilitating antipsychotics and ECT—electroconvulsive therapy—to expedite the flow of patients.
When Janice returns home her parents are no more sympathetic than before. Her boyfriend, Tim (Malcolm Tierney) and, especially, her older sister, Barbara (Hilary Martyn), desperately try to wrest Janice away from her controlling parents, but by this time she’s shut down completely.
Anyone who has experienced, or knows someone who has experienced, this type of mental illness will find Family Life unnerving. I had a close friend who suffered from what, obviously was treatable survivor’s guilt (she being the only sibling of a large family not struck down by the same genetic disorder) and obvious bipolar issues, but the system failed her. Like Janice, she was clearly misdiagnosed with schizophrenia and eventually institutionalized, committed to a horrific long-term facility, never to be seen nor heard from again. (Online descriptions of Janice’s condition describe it as schizophrenia, but Loach’s direction clearly implies this is a misdiagnosis made by Caswell after barely examining her.) In Family Life, the political jockeying within the hospital board among doctors professionally jealous of Dr. Donaldson’s success in treating patients results in a backwards shift in mental health care for all, to an almost Medieval system of shock therapy and medicating patients into a harmless state of catatonia.
Loach’s direction of a script partly written, partly improvised by professional and non-professional actors is enormously, even alarmingly effective. The parents—Bill Dean was a working actor, while Grace Cave was a non-actor housewife—are so completely believable their scenes with Janice, and especially a later Sunday dinner with older sister Barbara and her kids joining them, it plays like a deeply disturbing documentary. Cave is especially infuriating and unsettling as the mother, almost psychopathic in her subtle, passive-agressive manipulation and controlling of Janice. In lesser hands, audiences might have been frustrated that Janice doesn’t simply leave this abusive environment, particularly after her older sister offers to care for her, but Loach’s direction makes Janice’s own self-destructiveness believable even if one doesn’t entirely understand it.
Family Life began as a BBC Wednesday Play for television in 1967 called In Two Minds, written by David Mercer and directed by Loach. The film version is radically different, in part because apparently neither Loach nor the film’s producer cared for Mercer’s screenplay, prompting Loach to rework some aspects while expanding others through improvisation. Executive producer Nat Cohen, remembered mainly for his exploitation pictures through Anglo-Amalgamated, insisted upon a few minor changes of his own, and that professional actors be hired for certain roles. Yet the mix of professional actors (Ratcliff, Dean, Tierney, MacNaughtan) and non-professionals (Cave, Riddall) is invisible.
Powerhouse Films’ world premiere Region “A” Blu-ray of Family Life is presented in a flawless high-definition remastering, the film in its original theatrical 1.37:1 standard frame format. One imagines only a handful of 35mm prints (less than ten?) were ever struck, so the film is completely free of any damage or age-related wear, and is razor-sharp with excellent color and contrast. (Curiously, this British film is available only in the U.S.) The original mono audio is equally fine, supported by optional English subtitles (SDH).
Extras consist of The Real Deal, an 18-minute, 2024 interview with actor Jack Klaff discussing the life and career of star Sandy Ratliff; The BEHP Interview with Tony Garnett, a 2007 interview with the longtime Ken Loach producer that runs a staggering 98 minutes, nearly as long as the feature presentation; Looking East, another long (60 minutes) piece with film historian Michael Brooke, a visual essay connecting Loach’s film to the works of East-Central European filmmakers; a trailer and image gallery.
Alas, The Digital Bits was sent only a screener not accompanied by the reported 40-page booklet included with the final product. That features new essays and archival interviews.
- Stuart Galbraith IV