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My Name is Joe

No technology can ever do what Ken Loach achieves in My Name is Joe: create responsible, caring cinema that shakes the heart, packs a political punch and stocks its story with real, flawed human beings that you want to embrace one minute and kick the next.

Such as Joe, in fact. He is a reformed alcoholic, on the dole, as are his friends, who spend Sundays playing in Glasgow’s worst football team. While collecting one of his mates, Liam, he runs into Sarah, a health visitor, safely middle-class. They bicker. But friendship grows over pizza and wine, until hard economic facts and class differences rear their heads. Sarah has made a career out of offering well meant advice. But Joe and his mates have little room for manoeuvre: with inner-city poverty and hopelessness all around, the only available options seem to be drink, drugs, prostitution or crime…

Loach’s Marxist approach may prompt him to view this life as a battle between the monied elite and those trodden under, but he can still be comic and tender as he trumpets the human spirit. Against the odds, Joe and Sarah manage to fall in love: something most of Loach’s past characters, too busy speechifying or being angry, could never find time for.

For his cast Loach has gone for his usual mix of the raw amateur and the professional unblemished by fame. Peter Mullan and Louise Goodall are impassioned and natural as the odd couple standing forever on either side of the state benefit divide. Some of the more agonising moments, though, belong to Annemarie Kennedy, a part-time school cleaner cast as Sabine, Liam’s partner, a junkie mother trying to cling to hearth, home and baby in the face of gangland threats.

But whatever their background the cast never look like actors and only occasionally sound like them. My Name is Joe offers life in the raw, prickly and passionate: all other British cinema this year just seems like candy floss. — Geoff Brown, The Times, 5/11/98