Ken Loach’s latest film takes a micro look at the impact of refugees on English towns, putting faces to a plight that is far too often generalized in public consciousness. Working from a script by Paul Laverty, Loach spins a moving tale about a virtuous family of Syrian refugees desperately attempting to assimilate into an insular and decaying English coal-mining town, with the local pub serving as ground zero for cross-cultural interface.
Buy The Old Oak Blu-rayThe film centers on the supportive relationship between the pub’s aging owner, TJ, and a young refugee woman named Yara. Unlike most of the unsavory locals, TJ is welcoming to the refugees, getting to know Yara and her siblings and mother as he helps Yara to get her precious camera repaired in the wake of a minor hate crime. TJ has problems of his own, namely his floundering pub, annoyed friends, and his lingering depression in the wake of family loss.
While the film is overwhelmingly sympathetic to the refugees, the script takes the unusual approach of focusing on both the locals and the outsiders, with TJ and Yara acting as co-protagonists. This gives viewers the opportunity to see a fuller picture of the forces acting on both sides of the cultural divide, although the supporting characters are ultimately colored far too definitively black (lowlife locals) and white (angelic refugees). It’s depressingly easy to imagine a similar refugee reception in one of our own backwoods mining towns, and yet the well-developed characters of TJ and Yara and their supportive relationship makes it worth rooting for a happy ending.
The film is presented in its original 1.85:1 widescreen aspect ratio, with 5.1 and 2.0 surround audio options. The admirable cinematography and surround sound convey the dreary modern reality of the rundown former coal town, while also finding the glints of beauty in its everyday existence, such as shared tea time at home and jovial pints at the pub. The principal bonus feature is a 17-minute block of deleted and extended scenes, with the largest chunk of time devoted to added details about a pivotal plumbing repair job that is shortchanged in the final film. The theatrical trailer is also included.
Loach has announced that this is his final film, although he has come out of retirement in the past, but at the age of 87 it’s fair to say that this is quite likely the end of the road for his prestigious six-decade film career. The Old Oak is a fitting coda to his lifetime of socialist realism, a final mighty branch on the tree of his life in film.
