Theatrical Experience - Palme d'Or Winner Edition - I, Daniel Blake

I, Daniel Blake

Director - Ken Loach

Writer - Paul Laverty

Starring - Dave Johns, Hayley Squires

"It's a monumental farce, isn't it? You sitting there with your friendly name tag on your chest, Ann, opposite a sick man looking for nonexistent jobs, that I can't take anyway."

Ken Loach's Palme d'Or winning I, Daniel Blake is an exercise in crafting sympathy for a protagonist against a supreme, uncaring, systematic antagonist. It is the tale of Daniel Blake (Johns), an old, but not-quite-elderly widowed carpenter recovering from a heart attack who finds himself not cleared for work from his doctors but denied Employment and Support Allowance by a "health care professional" who believes he is not ailing enough to qualify for benefits. Daniel finds himself repeated railing against the welfare system being thrown through various hoops until he can take it no more. This is at it's heart a simple, effective story where we as the audience feel for the plight of the common man against the faceless entity denying him what he rightfully deserves and yet, on the screen it doesn't quite work that way.

Now I don't mean to say that sympathies are reversed or we come to feel that Daniel deserves his fate but simply that while we know we are empathetic with him, we don't feel it. Let me explain.

Before we are shown anything in this film we are given dialogue between Daniel and the health care professional where he is asked a series of inane questions not at all related to his heart condition. Here Loach deftly displays the insanity and banality of the system. All we are given is a the most basic image possible, a black screen, and a series of questions with increasingly stupefied answers from out common man.

Daniel repeatedly tries to make headway against this system and each scene has a similar setup and outcome. Daniel makes a reasonable sounding request only to be told by a stern bureaucrat that there is some rule or such preventing that request from being processed and if Daniel would kindly wait for something to happen or go off and do some other banal task then maybe the request can be processed.

Loach does inject quite a bit of humour into these scenes both from Daniel's increasingly exasperated responses and the bureaucratic jargon and terminology used by the system the confound Daniel and others looking for help. This comedic element helps allay the bleakness of the film but also changes how we watch it. Especially when paired with the scenes of Daniel struggling with basic computer functions which are played completely for comedic intent it produces an effect where we laugh at the general absurdity of the system more than we feel for this one man's plight. This is surely not Loach's intention. He's not making Brazil.

Also working against that feeling of empathy is the general lack of arc for Daniel. As alluded to above he spends the entire movie trying to get benefits while he is physically unable to work but never finds himself getting any closer to that goal, or any goal really (vague spoilers: he does make progress near the end). This is clearly by design to show the monolithic, undefeatable nature of the broken welfare system but it makes it harder to care for Daniel's trials. It becomes hard to care about this character when we can plainly see nothing he does matters and this will only end badly for him. Yes, we see how unfair it is and know who should empathize but as an audience we need something to give us hope.

This brings me to Katie Morgan (Squires) , a single mother of two Daniel befriends at the welfare office who sees how the system is rigged and unfair and decides that rather than rail against it she will do what she can to provide for her children. Katie is a character we feel compassion for. She is a woman struggling in the system to raise two children. She sacrifices for herself in her efforts to ensure her children have what they need. She forgoes meals, she cleans in the middle of the night. She is a testament to the strength of the impoverished.

The main difference in the stories of Daniel and Katie is how they interact with the welfare system. Daniel spends the entire film having the same scene with them over and over and over again while Katie, after being rejected early on, moves on. She accepts her fate of very limited help rather than face this behemoth of an antagonist.

This is not to say Daniel's story makes for a bad film. In fact many of the individual scenes are very well done and quite effective but that added up to a whole it is underwhelming and makes the 100 minutes of film feel like two and a half hours. Ken Loach feels for the British poor and desperately tries to make us feel the same but he only partially succeeds.

Schurmann Score - 6/10