I, Daniel Blake
We should all be drinking a lot more bloody coffee.
I’d always put off watching this, not because I thought it wouldn’t be good, but because I thought it would be frustrating to watch. The idea of watching a Ken Loach film is a bit like the idea of having a salad for lunch - it's probably good for you and you won't be sorry you did it, but it's harder to muster up the enthusiasm for it that you might for something less bleak sounding! I’m glad this HoF did make me finally watch it.
There’s an inherent difficulty in conveying the boredom and frustration of dealing with bureaucracy without making the film boring – watching someone on hold to a government agency is only mildly less irritating than being put on hold by them yourself. But while it was a little slow to start, the film manages to inject some humour and humanity in amongst the hopelessness of a man being ground down by a catch-22 system.
Having read many articles on the problems of the new benefit system and the disability assessment process, I wasn’t sure what more there would be to learn from this film – and it is a film that very obviously wants you to learn something – but what it did do was put a human face on the problem. People aren’t customers or service users, they are individuals and the system isn’t always built to handle individuals. It’s inconvenient coming up against a difficult tax form or ticking the wrong box online under normal circumstances – when a mistake in the system means you won’t eat that month, it’s more than inconvenient, it can be life or death.
I think it had a good point to make on the reliance on computers which can exclude older people, people who can’t afford a computer or people with disabilities who find it hard to use one. It’s not just government services who are guilty of this – banks want people to bank online, shops want to email your receipt etc. – but when it is government services accessed by more vulnerable people it is pretty shocking. I know a few older people who just wouldn’t be able to access services online.
I thought for the most part the performances were very natural and real – I believed in Daniel and Katie absolutely. Some of the supporting cast were a little too deliberate in their portrayals – the unhelpful job centre woman, for example – but at other times I wondered if they had just brought cameras into real locations like the library or the foodbank. There were just a few things at times that undermined the realism – the computer making a bleep noise when the form was filled in incorrectly, the police car putting the flashing lights on - and that was a shame because it then made me question the veracity of some of the other things shown in the film.
The scene in the foodbank was absolutely the stand out scene of the whole film – unlike some other things that happened later, I didn’t see that coming so it was all the more shocking and dramatically effective. It also made me want to donate more things to the foodbank so I guess in that sense, job done.