THE OLD OAK - Mark Reviews Movies

The Old Oak, Zeitgeist Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 4, 2024

"When you eat together, you stick together," the man's mother used to say. The statement became a mantra during the miners' strike of the 1980s, when the powers-that-be essentially tried to starve the workers to return to their grueling labor. Times change and circumstances along with them, and now, that mining town in Northeast England, like so many others like it, no longer has a mine to support it and its population. How has that affected the people of the village three decades later?

In The Old Oak, we're thrown into life in this little town in 2016. Everything that isn't closed, like the old church hall and surely too many businesses for anyone in town to list at this point, is falling apart, and the people are struggling with financial problems, health woes, and a general feeling that nothing here will ever get better for them.

Into this already-desperate equation enter a group of Syrian refugees, fleeing a home in the midst of war. Before the mine closed, maybe the people of this town would welcome them with open arms. Then again, it's not as if prejudice and bigotry are anything new, so perhaps that wouldn't have been the case.

It doesn't matter, really. In 2016, the population is divided about the new residents, and the ones who do accept their new neighbors are pretty much silenced by the other side, whose rumors about, conspiracy theories regarding, verbal confrontations with, and acts of physical violence against the refugees are too overpowering for someone like our protagonist. He's TJ Ballantyne (Dave Turner), and he just wants to keep the pub he has owned for decades afloat, while also being the decent person he believes himself to be. These two goals shouldn't conflict, but they do here, because his most loyal customers are among the group who just want the refugees to leave.

If this situation is bad for TJ, imagine how it must be for the Syrian migrants, and if there's a gap in director Ken Loach's compassionate and compelling (as well as potentially final) film, it's that the story does leave a lot of that to the imagination. There are a few characters of note among the refugees—primarily Yara (Ebla Mari), a young woman who is met with insults and a physical altercation upon arriving in her new home. She and TJ become friends of a sort, after he helps her family move into their new home and repairs the precious camera a local thug breaks, and there's something undeniably moving about the simplicity of their connection.

They're both decent people, who care about the challenges and pain of others because they've had their fair share and more of their own. The two talk about those matters—how TJ's father drowned on a job at sea, how he once considered joining his old man when his own life seemed drained entirely of hope, how Yara's own father was abducted and his fate is unknown, how she dreads to hope any longer because so much has been taken from her.

From those conversations, they also start to talk about how they might be able to help both the impoverished families of the town and the recently-arrived migrants. If anything, the two groups are alike in needing help right now, and the plan from TJ, Yara, and local charity worker Laura (Claire Rodgerson) is to get everyone to start eating together.

Despite the obvious conflicts and the apparent incapacity for any resolution to them, the screenplay, written by Loach's regular collaborator Paul Laverty, is an inherently optimistic piece of storytelling. In some ways, that makes it a bit naïve, especially in how and why these problems are resolved by the end. In others, it's a rather lovely bit of hopeful and maybe wishful thinking about how the simple, shared things of life can bring unity when all there seems to be in a situation is discord. As a dissection of modern politics and prejudice, the film is nowhere as believable, then, as Loach's typical, realistic approach would make it seem, but as a dramatic fable about wounded people finding some common ground in that misery, the story is often affecting.

Most of that comes from the attention to detail to the two main characters. TJ is just a normal guy, trying to do his best for himself, friends he has known for decades or most of his life, and those he knows have it much worse than he can even imagine. He loves his little dog for reasons that are revealed in a scene of heartbreak that's genuinely devastating, because it's so viscerally displayed to us.

That leads to a question of perspective, though, because Yara, who has experienced more than even she's willing to say in a warzone, is never granted a similar moment in the same way. Her pain is more theoretical here, as she discusses her notion of hope as the ultimate source of pain and how she mourns, not only her personal losses, but also the loss of her country's history, society, and culture to war. Mari brings the weight of all of this to her debut film performance (In a similar way, Turner brings internal conflict—between doing the pragmatic thing and the right one—and working-class angst to his), but at no point does the film ever find a balance of how it portrays the pain of these two characters.

It's important to note, for sure, but looking at The Old Oak as more a parable and less a comprehensive view of the reality of such people and such a situation, it's effective. The message of unity is simple, yes, but also necessary and, in the hands of Loach and these actors, emotionally resonant.

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