Champion of the Working-Class Joe

The sun rarely rises on the British empire in the dark-edged films of Ken Loach.

Since the mid-’60s, the 62-year-old English director’s harshly realistic films and TV docudramas have dissected and championed the plight of the British working class. Such raw, unsentimental films as “Kes,” “Poor Cow” and, more recently, “Riff-Raff,” “Raining Stones” and “Ladybird, Ladybird” have won Loach critical acclaim and festival awards. But his cinema verite style normally cuts too close to the bone for most British and American audiences.

His most recent film, “My Name Is Joe,” which opens in Los Angeles today, has been an exception, according to actor Peter Mullan, who portrays Joe Kavanagh, the title character. Kavanagh is a struggling working stiff in the Scottish industrial town of Glasgow who’s a former alcoholic trying to straighten out his life under the most difficult of circumstances.

“It’s been quite popular here [in the U.K.],” says Mullan, who picked up the best actor prize at the Cannes Film Festival last year for his work. “Before ‘My Name Is Joe,’ Loach’s name meant films that were serious, that made you think a lot. But the poor quality of recent Hollywood films--formula movies desperately chasing money--has worked to Ken’s advantage.”

Responding to criticism that his films are too downbeat, Loach quips, “ ‘King Lear’ was pretty downbeat. ‘Romeo and Juliet’ didn’t have a happy ending.”

But there’s no denying Loach’s films are down and gritty. How gritty? The working-class Scottish patois in “Joe” is so thick that it requires subtitles; it makes a film like “Trainspotting” sound like “You’ve Got Mail.”

“It’s proper Scottish,” notes the film’s writer Paul Laverty. “It’s the way working-class people speak.” Still, for the first time Loach has consented to add subtitles to the finished film for its U.S. release.

The drama in “Joe” deftly interweaves the characters’ personal struggles with Loach’s social concerns about the plight of the British underclass. An unregenerate Marxist, in person Loach is as mild-mannered as he is resolute in his political beliefs. A longtime critic of the Tory-led Thatcher and Major administrations, he has even come to blows with members of Britain’s Labor Party, calling the current moderate government of Prime Minister Tony Blair “right wing” and too beholden to the interests of big business.

“The interests of ordinary people and big business are totally opposed,” says Loach during a recent interview in Los Angeles.

Joe Kavanagh, Loach’s working-class hero is a charmer, a man of indomitable spirit who spends his days coaching a ragtag soccer team. (The animation with which Loach and Laverty talk about soccer makes most discussions of American football sound positively blase.) But like that of many of the director’s protagonists, Joe’s life is held together with hairpins and tape, and his desperation leads to some bad choices.

Joe is on the dole, but not because he doesn’t want to work, Loach points out. There’s just no gainful employment to be had. When Joe manages to sneak a little side job wallpapering a woman’s apartment, he is photographed by a spy from the welfare office jeopardizing his meager welfare check.

The social backdrop is the frame for a romance between Joe and a social welfare worker, a well-intentioned woman who is torn between her empathy for Joe’s dilemma and her familiarity with the violence and chaos to which the poor are sometimes prey. “Joe” is one of the few British films to deal honestly with the alarmingly high rate of alcoholism in Britain’s pub culture, linking it to the ruinous effects of drugs on the working class.

The correlation between drugs and unemployment is not coincidental, Loach suggests. The pacification of the disenfranchised is a way “for the ruling class to hypocritically say, ‘You’re poor and you’re to blame for being poor,’ ” he says.

The problem is systemic, says Laverty, who was in L.A. along with Loach. “If you talk to the local police in Glasgow, as I did, you see that there’s no real concerted effort in combating drugs. For people with no way out, alcohol and drugs provide an insulation, an escape. And the police don’t really try to stop it, because if people are on drugs, they’re not going to be organized, they won’t cause trouble.”

Few Filmmakers Target Subject of Class Struggle

Except for his compatriot Mike Leigh (“Secrets & Lies”) and American filmmaker John Sayles, Loach is virtually alone today in his pursuit of subjects dealing with the class struggle. After a fertile period in the ‘60s and ‘70s when he established his reputation, Loach’s style of filmmaking was out of fashion throughout the ‘80s. His life has been complicated by tragedy--a 1970 car accident in which his 5-year-old son was killed and he and his wife, Lesley, were injured. He only reemerged at the end of the last decade and has been quite prolific over the past few years, turning out about a movie a year.

Though his docudrama filmmaking style has not changed much--he uses real locations, casts that combine professional and untrained performers, minimal lighting and makeup--critics remark that his recent films are more emotionally engaging and humorous than his earlier work.

Actors such as Mullan, who has appeared in such films as “Trainspotting” and “Braveheart” as well as “Riff-Raff,” are eager to work with him because of Loach’s unusual directorial approach. Like most of his films, “Joe” was shot entirely in sequence, and the actors, like the characters they portray, had little idea where the story was going. Mullan received script pages no more than two or three days in advance.

“You’d memorize about 80% and improvise the rest,” he says by phone from England. “I loved working that way, not knowing if my character would be alive from one day to the next. Sometimes filmmaking can be kind of tedious. But this way every day is exciting.”

The director notes that film is a very different medium than theater, where the actors must have an “arc” to carry through a live performance and keep the audience engaged. In movies, the camera is telling the story. Keeping the actors just barely ahead of the story allows for serendipity and instinctual behavior to enrich the dramatic process, according to Loach.

A ‘Political’ Filmmaker

Loach doesn’t mind that he’s considered a political filmmaker, as long as that isn’t used as a barrier to obscure the audience’s appreciation of the characters. “I present Joe first as a man of great warmth and charisma. It’s only then that we discover he’s unemployed and has a chaotic life.

“I wanted people to see that Joe’s ambition is as great as his pain. Too often these characters are stereotyped, not presented as really human.”

Besides, he says, the label “political filmmaker” is merely the media’s way of ghettoizing his films. Films that champion the working class and left-wing causes are branded by critics as didactic, Loach says. But Loach and Laverty find it curious that most Hollywood movies--which to them are doggedly right-wing--are viewed as apolitical. Says Laverty: “American movies are very reactionary because of their subtext. They seem to say that problems can be solved with a gun. And look at how the camera worships wealth and indulges consumerism; the way emotions are coarsened by overacting and indulgent music . . . the tyranny of the hero and the happy ending.”

Whether his films reach a mass audience or not, Loach has no intention of changing direction. For him, being a filmmaker is ultimately about “what stories you choose to tell and where you look to find a story that illuminates the human condition,” he says. “With ‘My Name Is Joe,’ I wanted to give the working man dignity, stature and respect as a way of saying you are important and a fit subject for a film; to demonstrate that Joe’s feelings are as fine and important and valid as any bourgeois living in Manhattan.”