Film Review: The Old Oak

Director: Ken Loach
Starring: Dave Turner, Ebla Mari, Claire Rodgerson
Running time: 113 minutes

The film opens with black-and-white stills accompanied by a camera shutter’s sound, picturing a group of locals in Northern England blockading refugees’ minibuses, making a scene, and shouting discriminatory racial slurs at them. A group of locals, led by a middle-aged man, help the refugees put their luggage inside a council house, while out on the street, a man quarrels with the young refugee girl with the camera; lastly, he breaks her camera and departs. Right from the opening scene, the audience notices The Old Oak is a compassionate, dramatic depiction of a resettling programme for Syrian refugees back in 2016. A slightly lengthy narrative attempting to build a humane bridge over refugees’ crises and domestic difficulties that people face as a result of the deteriorating politics of the conservative party.

The film's biggest failure lies in its hesitation to pick a side; The Old Oak is uncertain to express its concerns in the light of socio-political consciousness or socio-political sympathy. Such a lack is no one’s fault except the filmmaker. Loach, with his directing, expresses his tendency towards the sympathetic side of this moving story. Although he tries to draw a line from the workers protests amid the Thatcherian era to the present day, this line fails to build a meaningful connection and acts solely as a reflection of Loach's personal experience, not a national movement. 

The Old Oak is thoughtful in its perspective and its view regarding Syria War asylum seekers; however, it should be said that it is a late and yet compromising reflection on such a matter. Loach’s previous titles — I, Daniel Blake and Sorry We Missed You — were direct critiques of British society’s biggest nightmares: unemployment and the growing gap between classes. Here, the blend of national concerns with international crises leads to a sentimental outcome that becomes overwhelming at certain scenes. For instance, the chemistry between the main characters, TJ Ballantyne (Dave Turner) and Yara (Ebla Mari), fails to develop into a friendship and stays at a sort of touristic level. Ballantyne is a kind-hearted, compassionate local who owned famous The Old Oak Pub for some thirty years, and Yara is the eldest daughter of the Syrian family, who is a passionate photographer and also the main carer for the refugee community in the village.

Most of their dialogue is centred on Assad’s regime atrocities and war crimes, Yara’s hopes and dreams, which were not presented in a compelling manner, answered with accounts of the old times in this Durham residence, and Ballantyne’s despair, his losses, and his struggles. Throughout the film we see the central characters reopen a saloon in the pub; the intent being to feed the people and to hold events as an attempt to bring the community closer and strengthen the bond between families. This allows Loach to build up the relationships between characters which culminates into a moving final act.

The core themes of the film are placed perfectly throughout the narrative, as Loach is masterfully capable of doing so. Loach is concerned with the thematic elements that he forgets to develop his two protagonists via their own voices. As a result, the film loses its point-of-view in certain moments and becomes unfocused. Compare this confused narrative approach with Mike Leigh’s Peterloo, in which the narrative momentum was successfully distributed between a handful of characters. Robbie Ryan's camera work is also unsympathetic and too mechanical, a Loachian trope that becomes ineffective in such a heart-breaking story. Loach is so invested in pointing out the contradictions bothering British society that he tends to forget to point out the common cause behind this unpleasant and unhuman condition. Instead, he fills the narrative with infective micro-stories.

Some of the side stories that ought to aid the main narrative get left at a loose end. Interestingly enough, such forgetfulness or deliberate negligence is associated with local English villagers. For instance, when Mara, Ballantyne’s tiny dog, is brutally hunted down by two vicious muscular dogs that belonged to the local boys, they run away from the scene without any consequences. Also, schoolboys who beat up a refugee and peer in the school yard, recording the scene get away with their locally viral video, and the children's punishment is never discussed or shown on screen.

The final scene is a classic closure in Loach’s cinema: the camera in long shot looks for the protagonists who are marching with the rest of the unions and workers, carrying a unity banner picturing an oak that was donated by the refugee’s collective to the pub as a historical witness to their friendship and a commemorative element. The characters march along with their comrades, and the camera loses them among the mass. Loach, presumably, convoyed his characters to an unknown future with his last feature, as he stated that this film is perhaps his final work. Loach chose to play the role of social peacemaker who seeks empathy from every corner of his society and abandoned his previous active existence as a radical filmmaker.

The Old Oak is a compromised, yet affectionate look at the extremely painful situation that we all live in; it transcends from a local angle to a global perspective and back. Through this journey, though, the film shifts from its potential study of marginalised people who struggle with a variety of social traumas to a TV-like account produced to make its domestic target audience revise their morale and have the utmost emotional impact on them.