My Name is Joe
Director: Ken Loach
Cast: Peter Mullan, Louise Goodall
Ken Loach’s cast and crew for My Name is Joe combines experienced industry people he has worked with before (Carla’s Song, Land and Freedom, Riff-Raff) and first time actors and local support to create a very real and compassionate film about survival and love in the climate of drugs and unemployment of Glasgow’s underclass.
Mullan is the likeable Joe, a thirty-seven-year-old unemployed reformed alcoholic who coaches a football team of unemployed youth. Despite being the worst team in Glasgow, it’s an essential source of support for the young men such as Liam, a former junkie with a young family trying to stay clean. Joe meets Sarah (Goodall), a community health worker, when they are both trying to help the family in the own ways. They fall in love, and through the film struggle to keep themselves and others from falling back into the traps of alcohol, drugs, crime and shame.
Loach does not need any blatant moralising on the problems of society; he concentrates on the small rather than the big picture, telling the story of these two people from different backgrounds doing their best to provide support to those who need it. The film is not as drab, depressing and full of horrible people as some films on drug and unemployment can be, but it’s definitely much more than the light and fluffy Full Monty sort of recent British film.
Audience: be prepared for subtitles. For most of the film they’re not really necessary, but it’s certain there was no toning down of the accents.
Susan Love
