My Name Is Joe - 1998, Dir: Ken Loach.

   Ken Loach is reknowned as a director who has panned the grimmest and bleakest waters to find some of the most memorable nuggets of cinematic gold produced in the British Isles. I can only apologise for the melodrama of this analogy, however appropriately it fits. In situations like the desolute ruination of Greenock in Sweet Sixteen (2002), and the working-class drabness of Manchester in the likes of Ladybird, Ladybird (1994), Loach frames stories of humanity in grey tableaux, bringing life to seemingly dead spaces in society.

   My Name Is Joe, in typical Loachian style, exposes the flaws of our protagonist (Peter Mullan) right from the outset. A jobless, reformed alcoholic, Joe's weakness for drinking is the yoke he bears throughout. It is the tightrope he walks that imbues him with a kind of fragility as he tries to do some good in his local Glaswegian community. An outing with the football team he organises, a ragtag group of crooked but likeable locals, leads him to meet Sarah (Louise Goodall). Naturally the two become close, and this relationship seems to be precisely what the doctor ordered for Joe, as we get further glimpses of the harrowing alcoholism of his past. 

   While the director is gifted at turning his camera on the lower echelons of city communities and finding warmth and hope, he does not neglect the more sinister elements of Glasgow's city streets. In local crime boss McGowan (David Hayman) he provides the villain of the piece, a man of few words yet the personification of arrogance. Joe and Sarah's mutual interest in a pair of local young parents, who have fallen into debt to McGowan, soon begins to come between their relationship and Joe is left to ultimately choose between his new love and the fate of the struggling, naïve couple. 

   Peter Mullan's performance earned him the Best Actor award at Cannes 1998, and it is easy to see why. Joe Kavanagh is a man who walks the same streets where the ghosts of his former addictions still linger. Mullan plays a man still not free of his desperation, yet who cannot contain his excitement at the prospect of a second chance at life. He has companionship in fellow recovering drinker, Shanks (Gary Lewis), and a real opportunity to find romance in his life with Sarah. What holds him back is his inherently masculine desire to fix all the wrongs that lie before him. This, tragically, only leads to the good things he has forged in his own life falling into jeopardy.  

   This film is almost the archetypal Ken Loach social realist drama. Loach has gone on to use a variety of the same elements in Manchester-based Looking For Eric (2009), albeit with Steve Evets in the lead role and Eric Cantona providing a supremely original twist. As usual, the director has employed a cast of mostly unestablished actors and non-actors from the surrounding area; and once again he has not been let down. This authenticity is what gives Loach's films a distinctive veneer; and while this film is arguably lighter in tone than some of his other work, the hard Glaswegian setting is no laughing matter. While there is comedy and romance in My Name Is Joe, it is still steeped in social realism. As the Bard of Avon is often quoted, the course of true love never did run smooth.

Verdict: 7.5/10