Old Oak, The (Blu-ray Review)
- Review Date: Sep 04, 2024
- Format: Blu-ray Disc
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Director
Ken LoachRelease Date(s)
2023 (June 4, 2024)Studio(s)
Sixteen Films/BBC Films/BFI/Canal+ (Zeitgeist Films/Kino Lorber)- Film/Program Grade: A
- Video Grade: A
- Audio Grade: A
- Extras Grade: C
Review
Director Ken Loach, now 88 years old, has stated that The Old Oak will likely be his last film. Let’s hope that’s not the case for, like contemporary Clint Eastwood, he’s still at the top of his game, The Old Oak being a profoundly humanist, inspiring and political work, hopeful yet not polemic, a kind of narrative feature follow-up to his documentary The Spirit of ’45 (2013).
Written by frequent collaborator Paul Laverty, the film is set in a once thriving coal mining community in the County Durham, in northeast England. After decades of Thatcherism and austerity, its residents lead threadbare lives. Pot-bellied late-middle-aged TJ Ballantyne (Dave Turner) operates the last public gathering space, The Old Oak, a once-thriving pub itself on its last legs.
Into this environment Syrian refugees are placed smack-dab into the heart of the community, in attached homes once worth GBP 50,000 but purchased by Cypress speculators at just GBP 8,000, driving down what little value aging locals had hoped to use as their nest eggs. The Syrians, arriving by bus, are openly met with racist slurs and threats of violence. One young refugee, Yara (Ebla Mari), is accosted by a particularly aggressive lad, who breaks her 35mm still camera, a treasured gift from her father, missing and either killed or imprisoned by the Assad Regime.
TJ, an innately decent man feeling both empathy and embarrassment for that less than warm welcome, gradually befriends Yara and her family, offering to help get her camera fixed. A divorcee long estranged from his adult son, he’s lonely but finds little comfort with the regulars at his pub, lifelong neighbors, all classic “I’m not racist but...” types.
Fueled by hateful social media, the regulars, including TJ’s old school chum Charlie (Trevor Fox), decide to hold a meeting to deal with the refugee “problem,” and ask to use the pub’s long-shuttered back room, but TJ begs off. The electrical wiring is shot, the plumbing is bad, that part of the building isn’t insured, etc. But later when community activist Laura (Claire Rodgerson) and Yara suggest using the SAME space to provide free meals to the hungry, locals and refugees alike, Yara inspired by an old union motto, “If we eat together, we stick together,” TJ agrees to their plan, but this upsets Charlie and his bunch, they believing that TJ has fallen in with a bunch of “ragheads.”
Early scenes are not unlike Eastwood’s Gran Torino, in which Eastwood’s cranky widower befriended poor Hmong immigrants. But where Eastwood’s character uses racial epithets out of ignorance and simple cantankerousness, in The Old Oak it’s everyone else, rather than protagonist TJ, that are so shockingly, openly hateful toward the Syrians. And where in Eastwood’s film his character’s slurs are almost comically over-the-top in the Archie Bunker manner, the hate here is raw and real enough to make viewers cringe with shame.
Yet, conversely, Loach’s humanism extends to the local people, whose kids go hungry, whose future seems hopeless. They’ve been radicalized by social media and political leaders to blame their poverty not on their government but the Other, foreigners with their strange dress, customs, and religion. But The Old Oak is no idealistic, kumbaya progressive treatise, either. At times, it’s a difficult film to watch with its constant set-backs, casual cruelty, and frequent tragedy. As the story begins, TJ’s only friend is a little dog, whom later we learned prevented him from committing suicide. An opening scene foreshadows the horrible fate of this beloved companion—a scene dog owners will find almost unbearable. The movie ends with faint glimmers of hope, but its open-endedness is believable and adds to its power.
The cast seems to consist mostly of non-professional actors, yet all of the performances and characterizations are exactly right. Star Dave Turner apparently is a retired firefighter; his only other film credits are roles in two earlier Loach films. Professional or not, Turner’s performance is so naturalistic, so honest and heartfelt it moved me to tears. Ebla Mari’s Yara has the advantage of youth, yet her Syrian friends consider “hope” a kind of vulgarity in this seemingly hopeless world of ours. When she marvels at the thousand-year-old Dunham Cathedral, it also reminds her of the even older Roman temples in Syria destroyed utterly by the Islamic State.
Zeitgeist Video’s Blu-ray of The Oak Oak, distributed through Kino Lorber, is an impressive 1080p presentation in 1.85:1 widescreen. The Region “A” disc offers English audio in DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 and 5.1 stereo with optional English subtitles. Strangely, it appears these subtitles are completely on or off throughout the film; there’s seems to setting to subtitle only the Syrian dialogue.
The only extra is a small collection of deleted scenes and a trailer.
One of the best dramas of recent years, The Oak Old is highly recommended.
- Stuart Galbraith IV