Welfare state drama

Navnee  Likhi

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British filmmaker, Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake, which won the prestigious Palme d’Or, at the Cannes Film Festival, his second after winning it for Winds That Shake The Barley in 2006, is the story of a 59-year-old carpenter from New Castle who fights to hold on to his welfare benefits, even though the condition of his heart does not allow him to work. 

Replete with tender moments and heart-breaking situations, the plot unfolds the ill-treatment meted out to the protagonist by those working in the bureaucratic set-up. It captures the world in which the opportunity to even survive is shrinking with each moment.

Daniel, played by Dave Johns, is a widower with no children. He has recently suffered a heart attack and receives an Employment and Support Allowance from the British state. Then, and for no good reason, his benefits are denied. The state wants him to go back to work, even though his physician has advised him rest. The movie takes the viewer through the agony of appeals, a nightmare that Daniel has to go through. He is forced to jump through hoop after hoop only to hurry up and wait, some of the demands being very unreasonable. Meanwhile, he spends about 35 hours each week searching for a job. It is a task he is unfit to do, yet he must do just to show that he is capable. The entire system is over-exaggerated with conservative government loopholes, which have been engineered and put in place for the sole reason of keeping people from being able to obtain the much-needed welfare benefits.

Daniel struggles to keep those benefits because without these he will literally be living on the streets. Such thoughts scare him. He is an old carpenter with little or no formal education, and no knowledge, whatsoever, regarding modern-day technology — “I have never been near a computer,” he says. Such confessions bring nothing but contemptible remarks from clerks in the welfare office. Daniel is forced to take a class in how to draw a CV, but even then, he writes in longhand. In the class, he also learns that there are a number of people applying for menial jobs with low wages. He wonders, “Why should I even bother?”

During one of his visits to the welfare office, Daniel meets Katie, who is in a predicament similar to his own. His kind-hearted nature inclines him to help Katie, portrayed by Hayley Squires. After getting acquainted, Daniel and Katie, along with her two children, bond and he helps her find a flat in the lower class section of London. It was the only reasonable alternative for her to survive after spending two years in a single room in a hostel for the homeless. With no money and no job prospects, the four hang out together as they have no other reasonable option. In their own way, they form a ragtag surrogate family. Daniel is as innocent as a child when it comes to the use of present-day technology. He shows he can only fix up things in their dilapidated flat, and give them tips on keeping it warm. Hayley Squire’s performance in the movie is heart-wrenching. She appears to be a woman, who has no being; she is merely existing — from one day to the next, and sometimes from hour to hour — a mother who eats close to nothing so that her two children might have more. 

The film’s shortcoming arises from the perception that it is the entire impersonal bureaucratic system that shares the blame; the layers of bureaucracy which are added onto people with modern-day digital technology are designed to wear people down. Daniel is a bold man, but lonely and filled with anger. Hopeless and seemingly helpless, he simmers until he almost explodes, which is the focus of the movie. There are times when the movie wades into informative pandering, hammering home with dialogue in a callous state that has already been embedded in the story. The tendency to pile indignation on top of indignation runs the risk of almost nudging the drama into a righteous soapbox. The beauty of I, Daniel Blake is rare — the movie has a rare dignity of its own.