(from The Guardian 12 May 2016)
With this movie Ken Loach
establishes himself yet further as the John Bunyan of contemporary British
cinema. Based on research and interviews by the screenwriter Paul Laverty, this
movie tells the fictional story of Daniel Blake, a middle-aged widower in the
North East (of England) who can’t work or get benefits after a near-fatal heart
attack, and the story is told with stark and fierce plainness: unadorned,
unapologetic, even unevolved. Loach’s movie offends against the tacitly accepted
rules of sophisticated good taste: subtlety, irony and indirection. The film is
not objective, and perhaps Loach and Laverty have signed up to Churchill’s
maxim about refusing to be neutral between the fire brigade and the fire…
This is a powerfully affecting movie. Set in the U.K. it is pertinent for audiences
in other countries as well. The movie is
sober, infuriating and sad. Practicing
medicine in the U.S., I can resonate with the maddening bureaucracy. Physicians
are almost nowhere to be seen here. It
seems like no one was running interference for Daniel Blake. That may well be the way it usually is.
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