Review of I, Daniel Blake (2016)
Seen in 2020.
The computer-illiterate victim of a heart attack falls under the thumb of contemporary British New Public Management.
As usual, Ken Loach does not pull his punches. Here, he mentions conservative MP Iain Duncan (Smith) by name, thus extending the movie’s real-world relevance all the way to one of the architects of the system, but it’s not an ad hominem. Although Smith himself authored a response, this is Loach’s usual socially conscious drama of problems above the personal scale illustrated on the personal scale. It is stylized: The fictional Dan is morally impeccable and his death is a dramatic irony near the moment of his triumph. I don’t think it had to be that way; apart from some poor child acting and the bizarre coincidence that Ivan is both a pimp and a grocery-store security guard in plain clothes, it’s all very well told. That said, being a drama, it does not present any evidence to support its crucial assertion that Jobcentre policies are designed to defeat the poor. There is no smoking gun corresponding to the Trump administration memo titled “Policy Options to Respond to Border Surge of Illegal Immigration” (2017) which advised mass criminal prosecution of refugee families at the US-Mexico border for the stated purpose of media play and deterrence, i.e. making migrant’s lives so obviously painful, even for children, that other people will avoid migrating. The same logic is implied in Daniel Blake’s contact with “the state”: If staying off work—even for legitimate reasons—is obviously unbearable, the workforce will be more pliant. It is effectively an accusation of torture, and it could have used a more concrete basis.