In so many ways, TJ Ballantyne is a classic Ken Loach hero: a working-class, middle-aged man trying to simply eke out a dignified living, but meeting obstacles at each turn — a victim of unforgiving social realities that leave people like him in the dust.
Like many of these Loach protagonists, TJ can’t get a break — even from gravity, as when he tries to fix the wooden letter “K” that rests above the Old Oak, the dilapidated pub he runs in a former mining town that’s been in decline for decades. Talk about decline: That letter keeps tilting downward, even when TJ fixes it with a broomstick. He turns away and it simply falls again.
Loach has never been subtle with his messaging, and why should he start now, at the apparent end of his filmmaking career? The 87-year-old director, who’s made nearly 30 features, has said The Old Oak is likely the last. He’s said that before, but assuming it’s true, the film is a poignant and moving coda to a career spent chronicling personal indignities amid broader social ills like poverty and unemployment.
And now, the migrant crisis. Loach and screenwriter Paul Laverty address this through an unusual friendship between TJ and Yara, a young Syrian woman and refugee who ends up, with her family, in the town, to the hostility of many. For once, a man like TJ and his fellow villagers, all struggling, are not the neediest in the story. There are others who need even more help. In this story of two communities at odds, Loach seeks to end a trilogy of films set in northeastern England on a message of conciliation and hope.
We begin somewhere near Durham, in 2016. Syrian war refugees have been arriving in Britain as they have elsewhere in Europe, and it’s no surprise that some have been sent to a desolate former mining town where housing is dirt cheap.
