Kritiken

At the heart of Loach's cinema is an ability to take large ideas and phenomena—such as the way the rise of neoliberal capitalism goes hand in hand with the hollowing out of the welfare state—and translate them into human-scale dramas that feel compellingly detailed, genuine, and truthful.

One of the most important films of 2016; there couldn't be a more timely moment for a film about the value of citizenship, and to issue a protest against the increasingly powerful dehumanizing forces of what you might call "client culture"... It's a drama very precisely about the present moment in the U.K.; but its resonances are much broader, and it will strike a chord in any culture where people are experiencing economic hard times.

It's easy to forget that his films are hilarious. When they're not screaming at indifferent and hostile government agents, Daniel and Katie eke out some valuable downtime, which are both casually warm and often quite funny. They're great together and apart; Squires is a particular revelation and one of 2016's best breakthroughs. Then there are those times that Loach and Laverty simply go too far. Still, even when they do, they always find a way back.

Problem is, Loach is still working with screenwriter Paul Laverty, [who] has an unfortunate tendency to get ludicrously didactic in the home stretch. The last half hour practically turns into Les Misérables, with Katie predictably turning to prostitution and Daniel's saga resolved via cheap dramatic irony. The movie is plenty affecting when it sticks to credible, low-key difficulties faced with weary decency; there was no need to crank the pathos up to 11 and throw a full-scale pity party.

Yes, Loach brings the issue to life by nurturing moving performances from a relatively green cast, especially Johns and lead actress Hayley Squires in their first major screen roles. But the film also follows an incredibly predictable narrative line that leaves little room for complexity or surprise. Like so many of its kind, I, Daniel Blake often feels more like a diagram than a film.

There is something thrilling about Loach's dedication to exposing the horror and mind-numbing pointlessness of bureaucracy with as little drama as possible. Audiences are supposedly always looking for something relatable. Loach has identified the last universal subject: filling out forms online. The anger the film generates shuts off delight in entertainment, an exemplary side effect of the film's agenda.

Katie's story heads in a more conventionally melodramatic direction, allowing Daniel to save her from herself in schematic fashion. This is after all a film not above parading a three-legged dog in front of the camera. Where I, Daniel Blake excels is in portraying the incremental dehumanization of the state's endless assessment process, which is particularly unforgiving of older citizens who might not know how to even use a computer (Daniel has apparently never wielded a mouse before).

With I, Daniel Blake, his latest film and one of his finest, Loach's talent for humour runs through the entire work. Here austerity politics is rendered both absurd and abusive in what the title character calls a "monumental farce", which might be funny if it weren't true.

In his familiar way Loach gives an edifying example of (non-)working class solidarity, yet the jolting moments are the almost documentary-like observations of how the welfare state works in the age of efficiency: Paul Laverty, Loach's long-time screenwriter, is at his best in turning the technocratic lingo of the desk people into Leviathanesque oracles, often referring to an ominous ‘decision maker' whose redemptive call never seems to get through to poor Daniel.

Loach has made an effectively upsetting film about a sickly welfare state, no less melodramatic for being entirely plausible.

There is a raw urgency to the film, not to say a disposability, which disavows an egotistical tilt at any kind of long-term artistic legacy. The film is designed—to borrow a phrase from American labor union lore—to educate, and partly to agitate. One even feels that if everyone were to see I, Daniel Blake once, but never again, Loach would be entirely content.

I, Daniel Blake," the winner of the 2016 Palme d'or at Cannes and the best film in many years from British stalwart Ken Loach, sums up the bureaucratic miseries of digital-era England in this tale of disabled worker waging a Kafkaesque battle to get his health benefits.