The Old Oak

18/12/2025

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Questions of Community

The Old Oak is perhaps the closest Ken Loach has come to making a film that passes for a weepie. His films have frequently had moments that are likely to move us — the sister realising what the brother has done near the end of Sweet Sixteen; the impoverished reality of the young woman in I, Daniel Blake, the father’s efforts to get a communion dress for his daughter in Raining Stones. Loach’s brilliance often resides in giving affective resonance to the politically unequivocal. The director’s work is very clear on what injustice is and who its victims are. But he also wants the viewer to recognise this not only as a political claim but also as an emotional realisation, one that doesn’t just result in socio-political awareness of what is wrong, but how important feelings are to the process of doing something about it. If there has always been anger in Loach’s work, there has also been sorrow, and yet this is where we might find a problem with The Old Oak. The film achieves in affect what it fails to achieve in political emancipation.
Such a claim can quickly become tricky: even a filmmaker so politically vocal as Loach isn’t in the business of making propaganda. Yet what we wish to explore is a political dramaturgy, a way of putting on screen a problematic that can work itself through to a purposeful conclusion, without arriving too quickly at resolving the problem because it has reached its affective denouement. In other words, we may come away from The Old Oak feeling very moved by the circumstances the film has explored, but sense that we have been cheated of the film’s full development. If recent Loach works like I, Daniel Blake chiefly explored a bureaucratic nightmare that becomes ever more faceless and punitive, and Sorry, We Missed You, the perils of the gig economy, The Old Oak is about what constitutes community. As Loach says, “The consequences of that [the mines closing] have been accumulating here over 40 years, and the communities are devastated. They’ve been left to rot, abandoned. And it was the area in which there were more refugees from the Syrian war than any other place in the United Kingdom. So you have two communities, both devastated, one with the additional trauma of experiencing a war. How do they live together?” (Deadline) In each of these recent three films, Loach and his screenwriter’s attraction to screenwriting principles gets in the way of developing the intricacies of the problem they are addressing. For many years now, since Carla’s Song, Paul Laverty has written, with consistency and great competence, Loach’s scripts. Yet he seems to take to heart too completely Robert McKee’s claim that there should be “no scene that doesn’t turn. This is our ideal. We work to round every scene from beginning to end by turning a value at stake in a character’s life from the positive to the negative or the negative to the positive. Adherence to this principle may be difficult, but it’s by no means impossible.” (Story). The quote comes from McKee’s famous scriptwriting manual, but it is also on his website, with a quote below from Laverty.
Laverty’s scenes certainly turn. We can think of three and their counter-turning. In the first, the English-speaking refugee who has, along with her family and many others, been plonked down in a Durham village as they escape the Syrian war, takes a local teenager who is feeling sick back home. As Yara (Ebla Mari) looks for something sweet in the kitchen, the girl’s mum arrives back and abusively asks Yara to leave the house. A while afterwards, the mum calls Yara on the street and apologises; her daughter explained that she was just being helpful, and Yara and the mum become friends. In the early stages of the film, we see the owner of the titular pub and the film’s main character TJ, alone and reliant on the company of his dog Marra. Halfway through the film, Marra is mauled to death and TJ explains to Yara how important Marra had been to him over the last couple of years. Thirdly, TJ and Yara work together to create regular meals in the backroom of the pub, only for a roofing disaster leading to a leak which destroys the backroom — no more regular meals. What we see here is negative turned to positive in the first and second instance, and positive turned to negative in the third.
One can see why the type of turns McKee promotes could be appealing to a writer like Laverty, who speaks about justice rather than screenwriting techniques. He doesn’t seem someone slavishly following the master’s methods; it is more that he accepts an aesthetic pragmatism while promoting political purpose. The turns in the script work well for someone who wants to show the importance of hope and the reality of it dashed when circumstances are against people. However, the problem then rests on how can you move the film along with such a method, how do you elaborate on the theme without getting caught in the binary system of turning scenes from positive to negative and back again? While this allows for constant drama, it can lead the film’s problematic getting stalled because its purpose isn’t to elaborate on its theme but to keep the viewer dramatically engaged. This needn’t be an either/or, but it will be if the dramatic takes clear precedence over the thematic, and perhaps the way out is through the dialectical.
But the film falls well short of the dialectical, partly because it doesn’t even quite follow through on the dramatic. One plot point is never developed, and another is left dangling. The first concerns one of the Syrian children getting beaten up and the pub regulars who are wary of the newcomers,  and insisting there is more to it than the video first assumes. The men in the pub reckon the boys involved aren’t young white thugs piling in on the poor Syrian, but closer to righteous retributors. The rumour is that the Syrian lad has been bullying girls at dinner time and pushed one of them over. They aren’t the instigators, the men in the pub insist. This detail is dropped, and yet it is potentially important. Much of the rage in the north of England over Muslims rests on the Rotherham scandal, where “Alexis Jay found at least 1,400 children were subjected to sexual abuse and she detailed how girls as young as 11 were raped, trafficked, abducted, beaten, and intimidated by men predominantly of Pakistani heritage.” (BBC) This wouldn’t make the white men’s reaction justified, but it would have given it a broader context than the film entertains. However, not only does The Old Oak eschew this broader context, it doesn’t even follow through on the implications of the incident. Has the girl falsely accused the Syrian boy, and if so, has she done so partly because of the suspicious atmosphere amongst whites, where numerous white girls found themselves pimped and exploited by men of Asian extraction? We might assume the boy is innocent, but that doesn’t mean the film shouldn’t explore its initial premise. The remark about bullying girls is potentially no more than hearsay that the men in the pub offer, but in the broader social context, it could be seen as a major source of resentment. Yet nothing is made of it.
We may believe that the regulars are bigoted and blind, lazy and given to gossip, but these are also the people who have helped keep TJ’s pub going for years. When they propose a meeting to discuss the newcomers in their midst, in the back of TJ’s pub, he turns them down. He says that the place hasn’t been used for ages, that it would take too much work to turn it into a usable space. But there he is not long afterwards being persuaded by Yara to utilise it for free meals. We could see that Yama’s suggestion could be psychologically and altruistically galvanising, as the regulars’ request wouldn't be. Yara and the Syrians are newcomers to his life, and bring some colour to the drab environment. TJ is, as we will later discover, a man without much to live for, with a wife who has left him and a son who doesn’t care to see him. The regulars will be part of that old life, and we can understand why he wouldn’t be able to work up much enthusiasm doing anything to help them, especially when he knows that the meeting is likely to bring into his pub people still more prejudiced than some of those usually in attendance. Surely it makes more sense to involve the community in cooking up meals during a period of austerity than whipping up prejudice during an era of hysteria.
Yet from the perspective of community, TJ’s decision is catastrophic. How can you expect to unite a people if it is predicated on division? Understandably, the regulars feel they have been undermined, and the newcomers prioritised. It is one thing to be friendly towards refugees, but if it seems to be to the detriment of the local people, this is hardly likely to generate a unified community. If we note that the Rotherham scandal allowed the far-right a foothold in many northern communities as Tommy Robinson of the English Defence League used it as an opportunity to see how evident a threat Islam happens to be, as “Robinson has seized on child sexual abuse cases involving Asian men to try and encourage racism” (Socialist Worker), then anybody exacerbating the divisions obliviously will be almost as toxic as Robinson, even if the intentions are much more noble.
It is this issue of alienating the regulars that, in another, more carefully constructed film, aware of its theme as well as its emotional content, would have made more of what amounts to TJ’s foolishness. By disregarding those he has known for years, and prioritising those he has known for a matter of weeks, he weakens the foundations of community at the very moment he wants to strengthen them. Though we have noted that a leak after heavy flooding causes the roof to cave in, we haven’t discussed the reason for it. TJ and others initially believe it was due to  bad weather, even if the pub regulars insinuate it was because of the poor workmanship of a Syrian man employed. Before the end of the film, we discover it was a sabotage job, with a couple of the regulars aware that with a small adjustment on their part, and heavy rain on the part of nature, the backroom would be unusable. What the regulars do is terrible, of course, but also understandable, and if the film, again, had been more interested in the complexity of its theme, it might have revealed this information a little sooner. It is offered to TJ by the young electrician after one of the saboteurs tells his dad, and the boy overhears the conversation. But little more is made of this (hence the dangling narrative) than what is made of the Syrian boy’s supposed deed. Sure, TJ goes round to his friend Charlie’s, one of the regulars, and asks him what he knows, but Charlie acts ignorant, and nothing is made of the incident thereafter. That Charlie feels contrite is clear: in a scene shortly afterwards, when many in the community congregate outside Yara’s house after she hears that her missing father is dead - killed in Syria — Charlie is amongst the mourners.
But while such a scene suggests Charlie knows what he did was wrong, and also shows that a large part of the town’s community is sympathetic to Yara and her family’s loss, it is dramatically weak and thematically irrelevant. The father has played no part at all in the story, and remains no more than a series of photographs. There is little reason for the locals to gather round with such solemnity, hardly knowing Yara and knowing not at all her father. Laverty and Loach might insist it conveys the community’s capacity for empathy, but that isn’t chiefly what the film has been about. It has focused on the difficulty of uniting a community that contains a new element in it, and at a time when the locals haven’t quite managed to unify themselves. The profound and important problematic The Old Oak sets up is the miner’s strike in the eighties, one that pitted miners who downed tools against those who continued working, and the present predicament with the locals and Syrian refugees housed in this northern village. This theme is clear when TJ takes Yara into the backroom early in the film and shows her the cameras he still owns and which used to belong to his father. Many of the photographs on the wall from the eighties were taken by these cameras, and TJ says he has no use for them now: Yara can have one. Yara’s camera was broken by a local idiot fooling around; without the money to pay for its repair, she appreciates TJ’s gesture and generosity.
The point, of course, is that Yara using the camera can give it a new lease of life just as the Syrians in the community can potentially do likewise. But while Yara takes the camera with gratitude, some of the locals regard this influx to their moribund community with great suspicion. Loach and Laverty are not insensitive to their claims, but rather like liberal politicians (and Loach would be clear that he is far to the left of them), the film pays dramatic lip-service to their resentments when what the film ought to be doing is attending to the thematic complexity that has been set up. The resentful reckon understandably that the government hasn’t tried to revitalise their community with newcomers, but dumped upon them a large number of people who can be more cheaply housed in the north of England than they can further south. If house prices have already collapsed, as Charlie points out, then that very collapse has been useful to the government looking for cheap housing, yet isn’t likely to do anything to raise those prices. The Guardian states: “Filipa Sa, a labour economist and academic, found that immigration actually lowers, rather than raises, house prices in some areas. In a 2014 Economic Journal article, Immigration and House Prices in the UK, Sa wrote that an increase of immigrants equal to 1% of the initial local population leads to a 1.7% reduction in house prices, based on immigration data from the Labour Force Survey.” That can be good or bad news, according to whether you want to buy or sell, and that seems quite a low percentage either way. However, Charlie is someone who owns his home and has seen its value decrease over the years. He wouldn’t be interested in anything that would lower it further.
Generally, Charlie and the other pub regulars don’t blame the refugees; they are more inclined to blame the government. Though in some instances their insistent claim that they aren’t racists seems arguable, we can see from their perspective that the community is potentially going to become further hollowed out and divided by the newcomers. If in the eighties, the mining villages and towns were divided through a class war, one Loach would certainly insist Thatcher engineered and stoked, here a conservative government is doing it all over again as it thrusts upon them incomers who will undermine the attempt at community. In an interesting passage, Slavjo Zizek proposes that “…fascism was not characterized simply by a series of features like economic corporatism, populism, xenophobic racism, militarism and so on, for these could also be included in other ideological configurations; what made them ‘fascist’ was their specific articulation into an overall political project (for example, large public works did not play the same role in Nazi Germany and New Deal America).” (New Left Review) By the same reckoning, the pragmatics of a Neo-Liberal economy can seem oppressive or liberal according to the specifics of the situation. It was the prioritising of economic imperatives to the detriment of the community that led Thatcher to close down the pits, just as it is another economic imperative that means Syrian refugees will be housed in the cheapest accommodation available. In the first instance, Thatcher cared little for communities she was emancipating from industrial failure, and equally, Theresa May’s government would have cared little all over again, even if the idea of the police breaking up strikes can be seen as oppressive, and the housing of Syrian refugees philanthropic. Nevertheless, the common denominator for many will be that the community risks fracture.
This is a profound problem, and perhaps it is unfair to expect a feature-length film to resolve it. But it is hardly unfair to say that The Old Oak invites an attempt to comprehend the problem. It make so explicit the eighties strike and the influx of refugees that it could almost pass for a Godardian provocation: the sort of juxtapositional conceits the French director would often insist upon as he asked us to wonder for example what a George Stevens film like A Place in the Sun would have in common with the Holocaust. (Stevens documented the liberation of Dachau.) As Loach says: “refugees from a war zone are placed in these desolate communities that were abandoned with little hope – how can they coexist? Where can we find hope in all that?” This, he says, “was the key question. When people who have been through the trauma of war are placed in a community of people who have nothing, where do we find hope?” (The Big Issue) Laverty reckons: “when you are dealing with two very diverse and complex communities, with all sorts of nuances – to try and figure out a way to make all that work is an enormous challenge – in the writing, the casting and the directing.” (The Big Issue) Loach and Laverty have set up a problem that they only manage to evolve affectively, but not analytically.
Again, some might insist this is not what art is for: it is to generate an emotional response, not an analytic one. Yet if we see art as a form of rhetoric, a mode of persuasion as Gilberto Perez intriguingly explores in The Eloquent Screen, we know that rhetoric consists of pathos, logos and ethos. By emphasising the pathos (the weepie), the film all but ignores logos, and simplifies the ethos. When many in the community come together in the penultimate scene, this is pathos without ethos or logos. It shows the capacity for many in the community to share a moment of grief, but it doesn’t ‘prove’ the village is unified. It only shows that many of them are sympathetic to Yara’s loss. It feels contrived rather than resolved, as though the filmmakers needed a situation that could show humanity without assuming this communal feeling needed to go any deeper than sympathy. Perhaps it doesn’t need to if we see the film as a work interested in a provisional as opposed to a permanent community. After all, the characters are refugees rather than immigrants: they are in Britain to escape the Syrian conflict, not chiefly to build a life in the UK. Nevertheless, Loach’s film shows that this isn’t a temporary stay, even it might not turn out to be a permanent one. The Syrian children are attending school, and Yara is very keen to integrate herself and the others into village life. Loach himself sees it as a film about community rather than chiefly refugees when he says: “hope is political, but it’s got to be well-founded. The way that gives you hope is that, in the end, the instinct to support each other is stronger than the instinct to walk away. I think that instinct is stronger. You have to hang onto that, and make it a reality. And out of that comes a different politics and a better world.” (Dazed) The film could have been about the Syrians’ difficulties in adapting to British life, but it is even more about the villagers adapting to the Syrian presence in their lives. The film might well have been about exile, but it isn’t. It is about mutual integration: how people from different beliefs and societies live together.
This is the film’s premise, but it doesn’t follow it through to the film’s conclusion, and it is why we find the film so moving and yet so utterly disappointing. It achieves only one aspect of its rhetorical inquiry. The question would be: what is it that divides communities and what is it that unites them? The film complicates this further by asking what it is that might possibly bring two wounded communities together after they are forced to live side by side. As Loach says, ‘‘They’re two communities. One with nothing, and one with nothing plus the pain of war. Can they live together?” (Dazed) Such an idea can result in conflicts exacerbated or contained. It can lead to understanding or misunderstanding in equal measure, and Loach shows both manifesting themselves. When TJ speaks about his suicide attempt, about his wife leaving, and his son refusing to talk to him, he offers it to Yara, someone who can understand his pain because she has plenty of her own. His estrangement from his son might be self-inflicted, but it chimes with Yara’s estrangement from her father. Such moments are expositionally plausible as they wouldn’t be if TJ were speaking to someone in the established community: they would know his past, and he almost gets into a fight with someone when it is invoked. The locals have each other’s pasts to hand, but confession is reserved for strangers. The pub regulars might have a problem with TJ’s complicity with Yara and see it as duplicity, but they are failing to note that here is a man who believes he has made a mess of his life and can find someone to talk to partly because others have made a mess of her country. In some ways, it could be argued that other people have made a mess of the English folks’ country as well, or at least the village in which they are living, and that is, of course, also part of the film’s claim. By closing down the pits and leaving people without money and work, many northern towns and villages were devastated. Loach isn’t shy in stating this: “it is an area of England in the Northeast, which is an old mining area where the mines closed. And the right wing party, the Tories, that closed the mines, were determined not only to close down the industry, but to destroy the communities. The area has just been neglected for the last 40 years.” (Festival de Cannes)
However, the important thing for TJ is that he made a mess of his life, and there he is telling Yara (and the audience) how he was given another chance when he saw Marra in need of care, and he could live and find something to love. We may have no problem believing in the friendship between Yara and TJ, without any need to see it as more than Platonic, no matter the insinuations of those in the pub. It is also here, though, that the film makes us believe in the possibility of friendship even if it leaves us unconvinced of the likelihood of communal togetherness. Predicating friendship as the basis for understanding community might be a synecdochal error: the part that stands in for the whole doesn’t take into account enough the complexity of the larger structure. If we say that because TJ and Yara connect across divides of culture, age, and religion, with Yara half as old as TJ, from a Middle Eastern country and a muslim, then there is no reason why everybody else can’t as well, this underestimates a key feature of division in the UK — the competition for resources. Matthew Goodwin has in recent years positioned himself as a man defending the indigenous Brits against elites and immigrants, saying “the blunt reality is that millions of ordinary people up and down Britain are utterly fed up with how immigration is driving up prices, rents and flooding social housing. This is best symbolised by the fact…that about half of all social housing in London, the country’s capital city, now goes to households that are headed by somebody who was not even born in Britain.” (Substack) There is a lot to question in Goodwin’s claims, as he offers a right-wing argument against mass immigration without much interest in addressing why right-wing policies are just as much part of the problem as apparently left-leaning laxity over immigrants. Robyn Vinter notes: “about 75,000 public assets, worth about £15bn, have been sold by English councils since 2010, in part to plug holes in their budgets, research by IPPR has found. “an average of 6,000 council assets – such as playing fields, community centres, libraries, youth clubs and swimming pools – worth £1.2bn have been sold each year in the past 13 years.” (IPPR) For the right, the country is in trouble because it lets in too many immigrants; for the left, it sells off too many of its assets. If Britain is collapsing, it need hardly be an either/or. On the one hand, resources are limited, and on the other they are constantly sold off. But both hands belong to the same body politic, even if the left are inclined to make less of one and the right less of the other.
There is also a resource paradox that Goodwin mentions and that The Old Oak briefly emphasises. Goodwin makes much of house prices almost inevitably going up when you have a large influx into the country (supply and demand). But he also notes that in some areas prices will go down, as we have noted. Generally immigration will lead house prices to rise, but, specifically, sometimes to fall. As Goodwin says, if one study has “suggested immigration lowers house prices this was only because more affluent locals ended up selling their homes and leaving their communities altogether —no doubt alarmed at what was unfolding.” (Substack). Perhaps, but this is the perspective Charlie offers when he talks of how little his house is worth, and the prices aren’t going to improve with immigrants moving in next door. Yet what the film also shows is that these are houses bought up by investors to rent, with little incentive perhaps to look after them, as their purpose is to turn a decent profit. In this, the film addresses both sides of the debate: immigration lowers house prices, while investors are buying up places and undermining the community. Charlie can visibly see the presence of immigrants, but he can’t see the companies benefiting from housing refugees in these properties, and potentially making good money on their investments. One reason why bashing immigrants is a lot easier than hammering investors is that it is easier to personify the immigrant over abstract numbers, even if the problem rests at least as much on the latter as the former.
These are issues the film raises but doesn’t find a form with which to tackle them because it relies chiefly on its lachrymose melodramatics. It is a commonly enough quoted comment, but Scott Fitzgerald’s remark that “begin with an individual, and before you know it you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created—nothing” (The Rich Boy) is worth thinking about in the context of how one dramatises the general. Many filmmakers don’t: they start and end with characters, hoping they are vivid enough to make us identify with them, and typical enough for them to represent a situation greater than their specific lives. Occasionally, filmmakers will remove that particularity all the better to show history at work (most famously Miklos Jancso), but it remains a pressing problem: how to present in dramatic form representations that are powerfully impacting on our lives but aren’t immediately evident within it? Jancso in films like The Red and the White and Red Psalm risked affective attenuation. But Loach arrives at the opposite problem: affective imposition. The viewer feels for the characters, but they might also feel that Loach arrives as the denouement emotionally without quite reaching it analytically. The pathetic element of rhetoric is strong, but the logical throughline weak, and subsequently the ethos foreshortened. When many villagers gather outside Yara’s house in solidarity after her father’s death, it is a warm moment of community, and aided by Charlie’s presence as he enters the frame pushing his disabled wife’s wheelchair. Loach and Laverty seem to suggest that the community has come together, but while we are happy that Charlie is there since it is to Charlie’s door that TJ goes to and confronts him over the roof incident, as if the others aren’t friends enough for TJ to be disappointed by their behaviour, it still leaves the problem of community intact. If the film’s point is that the good people in the town have turned out, and the others aren’t worth bothering about, this is a problem in a film that is predicated on community as integrity. Far from all films on the question of community care about this, and many a western genre movie predicates itself on the opposite: that it is only through the banishing of the villainous that the community can function: High Noon, Shane, The Magnificent Seven. Numerous films even include in this banishment the heroic figure who is nevertheless too violent a figure to be incorporated easily into the community, as in The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
However, one reason why The Old Oak is interesting, rests on this attempt to inquire into communal integrity, only to settle for an implicit exclusion that the film half ignores as it emphasises the lachrymose. Yes, we are happy that Charlie is there to commiserate with Yana and her family, and pleased by the very large turnout, as many in the village community show compassion more broadly towards the Syrian people. But expanding this outwards to the broader political dilemma Loach is invoking, the film hasn’t convinced us of the community’s cohesion. This doesn’t mean the film has to do so - we’ve made clear there is no obligation placed upon a filmmaker to resolve complex problems. Yet what the filmmaker shouldn’t be offering is an affective solution while the logical one remains incomplete, and thus the ethical one left vague. Loach says of his desire to make the film that “ Although there’s still the spirit of the solidarity of the miners when they were there, there’s also dissatisfaction and lack of hope.” Loach adds that “…into that area come placed refugees from the Syrian war who have all those negative feelings, plus the trauma of being in a war and placed somewhere where most of them don’t speak English. How do they cope and how do those two groups find a way of living together, and can they?” (Festival de Cannes) The answer is that in many ways they do - but because the truculent faction are neither included nor excluded, we wouldn’t be surprised if they will cause further problems, and we might have wished that Loach had arrived at a more provisional, anxious ending, one that might have curtailed the tears but wouldn’t have left the viewer feeling they ought to assume a more coherent community than events have led us to expect.
The film does at least broach a pressing question in a Britain that has to concern itself with the consequences of the Brexit vote, the surprising collapse of what has been called the Red Wall, as numerous safe Labour seats turned conservative, and an immigration policy that some see as too lax and others severe to the point of human rights violations (with policies proposing that immigrants be forcibly removed from the UK and taken to Rwanda). The Old Oak centres on a pub and focuses on a small community. But its ambitious attempt to use them to explore the issues just stated makes it as pertinent a film as any UK work of the 2020s.  We might mourn its failure as a work of political cinema, rather than its success as a weepie, yet it at least begins to address a problem that seems unlikely to go away soon.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

The Old Oak

Questions of Community

The Old Oak is perhaps the closest Ken Loach has come to making a film that passes for a weepie. His films have frequently had moments that are likely to move us — the sister realising what the brother has done near the end of Sweet Sixteen; the impoverished reality of the young woman in I, Daniel Blake, the father’s efforts to get a communion dress for his daughter in Raining Stones. Loach’s brilliance often resides in giving affective resonance to the politically unequivocal. The director’s work is very clear on what injustice is and who its victims are. But he also wants the viewer to recognise this not only as a political claim but also as an emotional realisation, one that doesn’t just result in socio-political awareness of what is wrong, but how important feelings are to the process of doing something about it. If there has always been anger in Loach’s work, there has also been sorrow, and yet this is where we might find a problem with The Old Oak. The film achieves in affect what it fails to achieve in political emancipation.
Such a claim can quickly become tricky: even a filmmaker so politically vocal as Loach isn’t in the business of making propaganda. Yet what we wish to explore is a political dramaturgy, a way of putting on screen a problematic that can work itself through to a purposeful conclusion, without arriving too quickly at resolving the problem because it has reached its affective denouement. In other words, we may come away from The Old Oak feeling very moved by the circumstances the film has explored, but sense that we have been cheated of the film’s full development. If recent Loach works like I, Daniel Blake chiefly explored a bureaucratic nightmare that becomes ever more faceless and punitive, and Sorry, We Missed You, the perils of the gig economy, The Old Oak is about what constitutes community. As Loach says, “The consequences of that [the mines closing] have been accumulating here over 40 years, and the communities are devastated. They’ve been left to rot, abandoned. And it was the area in which there were more refugees from the Syrian war than any other place in the United Kingdom. So you have two communities, both devastated, one with the additional trauma of experiencing a war. How do they live together?” (Deadline) In each of these recent three films, Loach and his screenwriter’s attraction to screenwriting principles gets in the way of developing the intricacies of the problem they are addressing. For many years now, since Carla’s Song, Paul Laverty has written, with consistency and great competence, Loach’s scripts. Yet he seems to take to heart too completely Robert McKee’s claim that there should be “no scene that doesn’t turn. This is our ideal. We work to round every scene from beginning to end by turning a value at stake in a character’s life from the positive to the negative or the negative to the positive. Adherence to this principle may be difficult, but it’s by no means impossible.” (Story). The quote comes from McKee’s famous scriptwriting manual, but it is also on his website, with a quote below from Laverty.
Laverty’s scenes certainly turn. We can think of three and their counter-turning. In the first, the English-speaking refugee who has, along with her family and many others, been plonked down in a Durham village as they escape the Syrian war, takes a local teenager who is feeling sick back home. As Yara (Ebla Mari) looks for something sweet in the kitchen, the girl’s mum arrives back and abusively asks Yara to leave the house. A while afterwards, the mum calls Yara on the street and apologises; her daughter explained that she was just being helpful, and Yara and the mum become friends. In the early stages of the film, we see the owner of the titular pub and the film’s main character TJ, alone and reliant on the company of his dog Marra. Halfway through the film, Marra is mauled to death and TJ explains to Yara how important Marra had been to him over the last couple of years. Thirdly, TJ and Yara work together to create regular meals in the backroom of the pub, only for a roofing disaster leading to a leak which destroys the backroom — no more regular meals. What we see here is negative turned to positive in the first and second instance, and positive turned to negative in the third.
One can see why the type of turns McKee promotes could be appealing to a writer like Laverty, who speaks about justice rather than screenwriting techniques. He doesn’t seem someone slavishly following the master’s methods; it is more that he accepts an aesthetic pragmatism while promoting political purpose. The turns in the script work well for someone who wants to show the importance of hope and the reality of it dashed when circumstances are against people. However, the problem then rests on how can you move the film along with such a method, how do you elaborate on the theme without getting caught in the binary system of turning scenes from positive to negative and back again? While this allows for constant drama, it can lead the film’s problematic getting stalled because its purpose isn’t to elaborate on its theme but to keep the viewer dramatically engaged. This needn’t be an either/or, but it will be if the dramatic takes clear precedence over the thematic, and perhaps the way out is through the dialectical.
But the film falls well short of the dialectical, partly because it doesn’t even quite follow through on the dramatic. One plot point is never developed, and another is left dangling. The first concerns one of the Syrian children getting beaten up and the pub regulars who are wary of the newcomers,  and insisting there is more to it than the video first assumes. The men in the pub reckon the boys involved aren’t young white thugs piling in on the poor Syrian, but closer to righteous retributors. The rumour is that the Syrian lad has been bullying girls at dinner time and pushed one of them over. They aren’t the instigators, the men in the pub insist. This detail is dropped, and yet it is potentially important. Much of the rage in the north of England over Muslims rests on the Rotherham scandal, where “Alexis Jay found at least 1,400 children were subjected to sexual abuse and she detailed how girls as young as 11 were raped, trafficked, abducted, beaten, and intimidated by men predominantly of Pakistani heritage.” (BBC) This wouldn’t make the white men’s reaction justified, but it would have given it a broader context than the film entertains. However, not only does The Old Oak eschew this broader context, it doesn’t even follow through on the implications of the incident. Has the girl falsely accused the Syrian boy, and if so, has she done so partly because of the suspicious atmosphere amongst whites, where numerous white girls found themselves pimped and exploited by men of Asian extraction? We might assume the boy is innocent, but that doesn’t mean the film shouldn’t explore its initial premise. The remark about bullying girls is potentially no more than hearsay that the men in the pub offer, but in the broader social context, it could be seen as a major source of resentment. Yet nothing is made of it.
We may believe that the regulars are bigoted and blind, lazy and given to gossip, but these are also the people who have helped keep TJ’s pub going for years. When they propose a meeting to discuss the newcomers in their midst, in the back of TJ’s pub, he turns them down. He says that the place hasn’t been used for ages, that it would take too much work to turn it into a usable space. But there he is not long afterwards being persuaded by Yara to utilise it for free meals. We could see that Yama’s suggestion could be psychologically and altruistically galvanising, as the regulars’ request wouldn't be. Yara and the Syrians are newcomers to his life, and bring some colour to the drab environment. TJ is, as we will later discover, a man without much to live for, with a wife who has left him and a son who doesn’t care to see him. The regulars will be part of that old life, and we can understand why he wouldn’t be able to work up much enthusiasm doing anything to help them, especially when he knows that the meeting is likely to bring into his pub people still more prejudiced than some of those usually in attendance. Surely it makes more sense to involve the community in cooking up meals during a period of austerity than whipping up prejudice during an era of hysteria.
Yet from the perspective of community, TJ’s decision is catastrophic. How can you expect to unite a people if it is predicated on division? Understandably, the regulars feel they have been undermined, and the newcomers prioritised. It is one thing to be friendly towards refugees, but if it seems to be to the detriment of the local people, this is hardly likely to generate a unified community. If we note that the Rotherham scandal allowed the far-right a foothold in many northern communities as Tommy Robinson of the English Defence League used it as an opportunity to see how evident a threat Islam happens to be, as “Robinson has seized on child sexual abuse cases involving Asian men to try and encourage racism” (Socialist Worker), then anybody exacerbating the divisions obliviously will be almost as toxic as Robinson, even if the intentions are much more noble.
It is this issue of alienating the regulars that, in another, more carefully constructed film, aware of its theme as well as its emotional content, would have made more of what amounts to TJ’s foolishness. By disregarding those he has known for years, and prioritising those he has known for a matter of weeks, he weakens the foundations of community at the very moment he wants to strengthen them. Though we have noted that a leak after heavy flooding causes the roof to cave in, we haven’t discussed the reason for it. TJ and others initially believe it was due to  bad weather, even if the pub regulars insinuate it was because of the poor workmanship of a Syrian man employed. Before the end of the film, we discover it was a sabotage job, with a couple of the regulars aware that with a small adjustment on their part, and heavy rain on the part of nature, the backroom would be unusable. What the regulars do is terrible, of course, but also understandable, and if the film, again, had been more interested in the complexity of its theme, it might have revealed this information a little sooner. It is offered to TJ by the young electrician after one of the saboteurs tells his dad, and the boy overhears the conversation. But little more is made of this (hence the dangling narrative) than what is made of the Syrian boy’s supposed deed. Sure, TJ goes round to his friend Charlie’s, one of the regulars, and asks him what he knows, but Charlie acts ignorant, and nothing is made of the incident thereafter. That Charlie feels contrite is clear: in a scene shortly afterwards, when many in the community congregate outside Yara’s house after she hears that her missing father is dead - killed in Syria — Charlie is amongst the mourners.
But while such a scene suggests Charlie knows what he did was wrong, and also shows that a large part of the town’s community is sympathetic to Yara and her family’s loss, it is dramatically weak and thematically irrelevant. The father has played no part at all in the story, and remains no more than a series of photographs. There is little reason for the locals to gather round with such solemnity, hardly knowing Yara and knowing not at all her father. Laverty and Loach might insist it conveys the community’s capacity for empathy, but that isn’t chiefly what the film has been about. It has focused on the difficulty of uniting a community that contains a new element in it, and at a time when the locals haven’t quite managed to unify themselves. The profound and important problematic The Old Oak sets up is the miner’s strike in the eighties, one that pitted miners who downed tools against those who continued working, and the present predicament with the locals and Syrian refugees housed in this northern village. This theme is clear when TJ takes Yara into the backroom early in the film and shows her the cameras he still owns and which used to belong to his father. Many of the photographs on the wall from the eighties were taken by these cameras, and TJ says he has no use for them now: Yara can have one. Yara’s camera was broken by a local idiot fooling around; without the money to pay for its repair, she appreciates TJ’s gesture and generosity.
The point, of course, is that Yara using the camera can give it a new lease of life just as the Syrians in the community can potentially do likewise. But while Yara takes the camera with gratitude, some of the locals regard this influx to their moribund community with great suspicion. Loach and Laverty are not insensitive to their claims, but rather like liberal politicians (and Loach would be clear that he is far to the left of them), the film pays dramatic lip-service to their resentments when what the film ought to be doing is attending to the thematic complexity that has been set up. The resentful reckon understandably that the government hasn’t tried to revitalise their community with newcomers, but dumped upon them a large number of people who can be more cheaply housed in the north of England than they can further south. If house prices have already collapsed, as Charlie points out, then that very collapse has been useful to the government looking for cheap housing, yet isn’t likely to do anything to raise those prices. The Guardian states: “Filipa Sa, a labour economist and academic, found that immigration actually lowers, rather than raises, house prices in some areas. In a 2014 Economic Journal article, Immigration and House Prices in the UK, Sa wrote that an increase of immigrants equal to 1% of the initial local population leads to a 1.7% reduction in house prices, based on immigration data from the Labour Force Survey.” That can be good or bad news, according to whether you want to buy or sell, and that seems quite a low percentage either way. However, Charlie is someone who owns his home and has seen its value decrease over the years. He wouldn’t be interested in anything that would lower it further.
Generally, Charlie and the other pub regulars don’t blame the refugees; they are more inclined to blame the government. Though in some instances their insistent claim that they aren’t racists seems arguable, we can see from their perspective that the community is potentially going to become further hollowed out and divided by the newcomers. If in the eighties, the mining villages and towns were divided through a class war, one Loach would certainly insist Thatcher engineered and stoked, here a conservative government is doing it all over again as it thrusts upon them incomers who will undermine the attempt at community. In an interesting passage, Slavjo Zizek proposes that “…fascism was not characterized simply by a series of features like economic corporatism, populism, xenophobic racism, militarism and so on, for these could also be included in other ideological configurations; what made them ‘fascist’ was their specific articulation into an overall political project (for example, large public works did not play the same role in Nazi Germany and New Deal America).” (New Left Review) By the same reckoning, the pragmatics of a Neo-Liberal economy can seem oppressive or liberal according to the specifics of the situation. It was the prioritising of economic imperatives to the detriment of the community that led Thatcher to close down the pits, just as it is another economic imperative that means Syrian refugees will be housed in the cheapest accommodation available. In the first instance, Thatcher cared little for communities she was emancipating from industrial failure, and equally, Theresa May’s government would have cared little all over again, even if the idea of the police breaking up strikes can be seen as oppressive, and the housing of Syrian refugees philanthropic. Nevertheless, the common denominator for many will be that the community risks fracture.
This is a profound problem, and perhaps it is unfair to expect a feature-length film to resolve it. But it is hardly unfair to say that The Old Oak invites an attempt to comprehend the problem. It make so explicit the eighties strike and the influx of refugees that it could almost pass for a Godardian provocation: the sort of juxtapositional conceits the French director would often insist upon as he asked us to wonder for example what a George Stevens film like A Place in the Sun would have in common with the Holocaust. (Stevens documented the liberation of Dachau.) As Loach says: “refugees from a war zone are placed in these desolate communities that were abandoned with little hope – how can they coexist? Where can we find hope in all that?” This, he says, “was the key question. When people who have been through the trauma of war are placed in a community of people who have nothing, where do we find hope?” (The Big Issue) Laverty reckons: “when you are dealing with two very diverse and complex communities, with all sorts of nuances – to try and figure out a way to make all that work is an enormous challenge – in the writing, the casting and the directing.” (The Big Issue) Loach and Laverty have set up a problem that they only manage to evolve affectively, but not analytically.
Again, some might insist this is not what art is for: it is to generate an emotional response, not an analytic one. Yet if we see art as a form of rhetoric, a mode of persuasion as Gilberto Perez intriguingly explores in The Eloquent Screen, we know that rhetoric consists of pathos, logos and ethos. By emphasising the pathos (the weepie), the film all but ignores logos, and simplifies the ethos. When many in the community come together in the penultimate scene, this is pathos without ethos or logos. It shows the capacity for many in the community to share a moment of grief, but it doesn’t ‘prove’ the village is unified. It only shows that many of them are sympathetic to Yara’s loss. It feels contrived rather than resolved, as though the filmmakers needed a situation that could show humanity without assuming this communal feeling needed to go any deeper than sympathy. Perhaps it doesn’t need to if we see the film as a work interested in a provisional as opposed to a permanent community. After all, the characters are refugees rather than immigrants: they are in Britain to escape the Syrian conflict, not chiefly to build a life in the UK. Nevertheless, Loach’s film shows that this isn’t a temporary stay, even it might not turn out to be a permanent one. The Syrian children are attending school, and Yara is very keen to integrate herself and the others into village life. Loach himself sees it as a film about community rather than chiefly refugees when he says: “hope is political, but it’s got to be well-founded. The way that gives you hope is that, in the end, the instinct to support each other is stronger than the instinct to walk away. I think that instinct is stronger. You have to hang onto that, and make it a reality. And out of that comes a different politics and a better world.” (Dazed) The film could have been about the Syrians’ difficulties in adapting to British life, but it is even more about the villagers adapting to the Syrian presence in their lives. The film might well have been about exile, but it isn’t. It is about mutual integration: how people from different beliefs and societies live together.
This is the film’s premise, but it doesn’t follow it through to the film’s conclusion, and it is why we find the film so moving and yet so utterly disappointing. It achieves only one aspect of its rhetorical inquiry. The question would be: what is it that divides communities and what is it that unites them? The film complicates this further by asking what it is that might possibly bring two wounded communities together after they are forced to live side by side. As Loach says, ‘‘They’re two communities. One with nothing, and one with nothing plus the pain of war. Can they live together?” (Dazed) Such an idea can result in conflicts exacerbated or contained. It can lead to understanding or misunderstanding in equal measure, and Loach shows both manifesting themselves. When TJ speaks about his suicide attempt, about his wife leaving, and his son refusing to talk to him, he offers it to Yara, someone who can understand his pain because she has plenty of her own. His estrangement from his son might be self-inflicted, but it chimes with Yara’s estrangement from her father. Such moments are expositionally plausible as they wouldn’t be if TJ were speaking to someone in the established community: they would know his past, and he almost gets into a fight with someone when it is invoked. The locals have each other’s pasts to hand, but confession is reserved for strangers. The pub regulars might have a problem with TJ’s complicity with Yara and see it as duplicity, but they are failing to note that here is a man who believes he has made a mess of his life and can find someone to talk to partly because others have made a mess of her country. In some ways, it could be argued that other people have made a mess of the English folks’ country as well, or at least the village in which they are living, and that is, of course, also part of the film’s claim. By closing down the pits and leaving people without money and work, many northern towns and villages were devastated. Loach isn’t shy in stating this: “it is an area of England in the Northeast, which is an old mining area where the mines closed. And the right wing party, the Tories, that closed the mines, were determined not only to close down the industry, but to destroy the communities. The area has just been neglected for the last 40 years.” (Festival de Cannes)
However, the important thing for TJ is that he made a mess of his life, and there he is telling Yara (and the audience) how he was given another chance when he saw Marra in need of care, and he could live and find something to love. We may have no problem believing in the friendship between Yara and TJ, without any need to see it as more than Platonic, no matter the insinuations of those in the pub. It is also here, though, that the film makes us believe in the possibility of friendship even if it leaves us unconvinced of the likelihood of communal togetherness. Predicating friendship as the basis for understanding community might be a synecdochal error: the part that stands in for the whole doesn’t take into account enough the complexity of the larger structure. If we say that because TJ and Yara connect across divides of culture, age, and religion, with Yara half as old as TJ, from a Middle Eastern country and a muslim, then there is no reason why everybody else can’t as well, this underestimates a key feature of division in the UK — the competition for resources. Matthew Goodwin has in recent years positioned himself as a man defending the indigenous Brits against elites and immigrants, saying “the blunt reality is that millions of ordinary people up and down Britain are utterly fed up with how immigration is driving up prices, rents and flooding social housing. This is best symbolised by the fact…that about half of all social housing in London, the country’s capital city, now goes to households that are headed by somebody who was not even born in Britain.” (Substack) There is a lot to question in Goodwin’s claims, as he offers a right-wing argument against mass immigration without much interest in addressing why right-wing policies are just as much part of the problem as apparently left-leaning laxity over immigrants. Robyn Vinter notes: “about 75,000 public assets, worth about £15bn, have been sold by English councils since 2010, in part to plug holes in their budgets, research by IPPR has found. “an average of 6,000 council assets – such as playing fields, community centres, libraries, youth clubs and swimming pools – worth £1.2bn have been sold each year in the past 13 years.” (IPPR) For the right, the country is in trouble because it lets in too many immigrants; for the left, it sells off too many of its assets. If Britain is collapsing, it need hardly be an either/or. On the one hand, resources are limited, and on the other they are constantly sold off. But both hands belong to the same body politic, even if the left are inclined to make less of one and the right less of the other.
There is also a resource paradox that Goodwin mentions and that The Old Oak briefly emphasises. Goodwin makes much of house prices almost inevitably going up when you have a large influx into the country (supply and demand). But he also notes that in some areas prices will go down, as we have noted. Generally immigration will lead house prices to rise, but, specifically, sometimes to fall. As Goodwin says, if one study has “suggested immigration lowers house prices this was only because more affluent locals ended up selling their homes and leaving their communities altogether —no doubt alarmed at what was unfolding.” (Substack). Perhaps, but this is the perspective Charlie offers when he talks of how little his house is worth, and the prices aren’t going to improve with immigrants moving in next door. Yet what the film also shows is that these are houses bought up by investors to rent, with little incentive perhaps to look after them, as their purpose is to turn a decent profit. In this, the film addresses both sides of the debate: immigration lowers house prices, while investors are buying up places and undermining the community. Charlie can visibly see the presence of immigrants, but he can’t see the companies benefiting from housing refugees in these properties, and potentially making good money on their investments. One reason why bashing immigrants is a lot easier than hammering investors is that it is easier to personify the immigrant over abstract numbers, even if the problem rests at least as much on the latter as the former.
These are issues the film raises but doesn’t find a form with which to tackle them because it relies chiefly on its lachrymose melodramatics. It is a commonly enough quoted comment, but Scott Fitzgerald’s remark that “begin with an individual, and before you know it you find that you have created a type; begin with a type, and you find that you have created—nothing” (The Rich Boy) is worth thinking about in the context of how one dramatises the general. Many filmmakers don’t: they start and end with characters, hoping they are vivid enough to make us identify with them, and typical enough for them to represent a situation greater than their specific lives. Occasionally, filmmakers will remove that particularity all the better to show history at work (most famously Miklos Jancso), but it remains a pressing problem: how to present in dramatic form representations that are powerfully impacting on our lives but aren’t immediately evident within it? Jancso in films like The Red and the White and Red Psalm risked affective attenuation. But Loach arrives at the opposite problem: affective imposition. The viewer feels for the characters, but they might also feel that Loach arrives as the denouement emotionally without quite reaching it analytically. The pathetic element of rhetoric is strong, but the logical throughline weak, and subsequently the ethos foreshortened. When many villagers gather outside Yara’s house in solidarity after her father’s death, it is a warm moment of community, and aided by Charlie’s presence as he enters the frame pushing his disabled wife’s wheelchair. Loach and Laverty seem to suggest that the community has come together, but while we are happy that Charlie is there since it is to Charlie’s door that TJ goes to and confronts him over the roof incident, as if the others aren’t friends enough for TJ to be disappointed by their behaviour, it still leaves the problem of community intact. If the film’s point is that the good people in the town have turned out, and the others aren’t worth bothering about, this is a problem in a film that is predicated on community as integrity. Far from all films on the question of community care about this, and many a western genre movie predicates itself on the opposite: that it is only through the banishing of the villainous that the community can function: High Noon, Shane, The Magnificent Seven. Numerous films even include in this banishment the heroic figure who is nevertheless too violent a figure to be incorporated easily into the community, as in The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
However, one reason why The Old Oak is interesting, rests on this attempt to inquire into communal integrity, only to settle for an implicit exclusion that the film half ignores as it emphasises the lachrymose. Yes, we are happy that Charlie is there to commiserate with Yana and her family, and pleased by the very large turnout, as many in the village community show compassion more broadly towards the Syrian people. But expanding this outwards to the broader political dilemma Loach is invoking, the film hasn’t convinced us of the community’s cohesion. This doesn’t mean the film has to do so - we’ve made clear there is no obligation placed upon a filmmaker to resolve complex problems. Yet what the filmmaker shouldn’t be offering is an affective solution while the logical one remains incomplete, and thus the ethical one left vague. Loach says of his desire to make the film that “ Although there’s still the spirit of the solidarity of the miners when they were there, there’s also dissatisfaction and lack of hope.” Loach adds that “…into that area come placed refugees from the Syrian war who have all those negative feelings, plus the trauma of being in a war and placed somewhere where most of them don’t speak English. How do they cope and how do those two groups find a way of living together, and can they?” (Festival de Cannes) The answer is that in many ways they do - but because the truculent faction are neither included nor excluded, we wouldn’t be surprised if they will cause further problems, and we might have wished that Loach had arrived at a more provisional, anxious ending, one that might have curtailed the tears but wouldn’t have left the viewer feeling they ought to assume a more coherent community than events have led us to expect.
The film does at least broach a pressing question in a Britain that has to concern itself with the consequences of the Brexit vote, the surprising collapse of what has been called the Red Wall, as numerous safe Labour seats turned conservative, and an immigration policy that some see as too lax and others severe to the point of human rights violations (with policies proposing that immigrants be forcibly removed from the UK and taken to Rwanda). The Old Oak centres on a pub and focuses on a small community. But its ambitious attempt to use them to explore the issues just stated makes it as pertinent a film as any UK work of the 2020s.  We might mourn its failure as a work of political cinema, rather than its success as a weepie, yet it at least begins to address a problem that seems unlikely to go away soon.

© Tony McKibbin