Peter Mullan, who won the Cannes Best Actor award in 1998 for his performance in Ken Loach’s My Name is Joe made his directorial debut, Orphans, that same year. The film was reflective of Mullan’s own upbringing in a working-class family with several siblings and an abusive alcoholic father. Mullan’s role as a recovering alcoholic in My Name is Joe is also biographical, in the sense that it reflected Mullan’s experience with alcoholism and welfare in his childhood home. In what seems like an almost redemptive performance in this context, Mullan brings an aching vulnerability and charming affectation to the role of Joe as he is trying to put his life back together. He is enthusiastic and hopeful in spurts, but still melancholic about his addiction. As many addicts have said, an addict never stops being an addict, but is just in perpetual recovery from it.
Ken Loach’s protagonists likewise are often in perpetual recovery from a system engineered to keep them desperate. Often working-class, often caught between a rock and a hard place, they are constantly at the brink of breaking their moral codes. It’s the classic conundrum of crime films such as The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973), but Loach has only made two of those: Sweet Sixteen (2002) and My Name is Joe. The latter, a romantic crime film, is one of the filmmaker’s most unique projects. In it, genre conventions are woven along with the filmmaker’s unmistakable political commentary to create a melancholic, but hopeful film about how material conditions can drive desperation and ruin love. Centered on the relationship between recovering alcoholic Joe Kavanagh and a health visitor named Sarah (Louise Goodall), the movie explores the ways that capitalist and conservative policy disrupt not only the ability for people to live peacefully, but to form any sort of companionship or human connection with one another. Loach films tender and tense moments between the two with a simplicity that brings forth their genuine connection to each other, but there is always a specter hanging over them. The structure Loach employs is familiar to admirers of his cinema—characters speak their minds and spill their hearts with a knowledge that at any turn things could fall apart.
In My Name is Joe, Loach builds a distinct parallel between the ways people fall into debt to criminals and to the state, and how both entities revel in holding people hostage to those situations. While Joe has turned a new leaf from his addict days, the government still treats him like a criminal, bringing him before the welfare board for petty policy injunctions. His past is a constant threat to the new life he is building and the hope of love as a ladder for escape always seems to come up short. He eventually gives into his past life to help his friend escape debt from criminals. He explains to Sarah that he didn’t grow up under the same circumstances as her, defining a rift in class between the two that throws their romance into peril. For Loach, the specters of capitalism, inequality, and greed rear their ugly head once more, but this time, not just as obstacles for socialism, but obstacles to love and fulfillment.
My Name is Joe screens this afternoon, April 29, at Film Forum on 35mm as part of the retrospective “Ken Loach.”
