Is it really impossible to believe a good, hard-working and stubborn man in his late 50s, from the dark side of the Tyne-Wear divide, should be told by his doctor he cannot work after a heart attack and by benefits officers he cannot receive benefits because he is fit to work?
That is the nub of Ken Loach's I Daniel Blake, the film that won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, brought tears to my eyes in a London cinema and has attracted tribal attacks from right-wing commentators and politicians.
The Newcastle benefits staff dealing with Blake's case are depicted, with one exception, as cold, mechanically compassion-free functionaries ganging up cruelly on one claimant and also reason, reducing him to a pitiful wreck of a man deprived of honour and hope.
I have been known to complain about film or television drama that lacks credibility. I want always to be able to believe even fiction is something that might possibly happen. But I also accept there must be scope for licence, to make a powerful point through a composite case study that brings together the experiences of many and perhaps even dwells on the worst or best examples.
In the small town of Saint-Martin-Vésubie, an easy 65km drive through the magnificent Alpes-Maritimes north of Nice, I once chanced upon a ceremony posthumously saluting two gendarmes who risked their lives to keep Jewish children safe from vile, murdering Nazis during occupation. The weekend I visited, they were appointed Les Justes, a select band of brave non-Jews people honoured by the Israeli Yad Vashem institute for saving Jewish lives in the Second World War.
If a film about the events in Saint-Martin were to be made by Loach or another director, it would highlight the gestures and lives of these men and their wives, not the many who collaborated or denounced.
Similarly, you can imagine a film about a plain-dealing, philanthropic banker or a benevolent factor owner who actually cared about and protected his employees. It would focus on him or her in each case, not heartless, grasping contemporaries in the same walks of life.
Doesn’t I Daniel Blake fit into this phenomenon, namely of portraying that which is remarkable rather than the commonplace in order to point to a failure of the system?
Not if you agree with The Sunday Times, Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph and Evening Standard film critics Camilla Long, Toby Young, Robbie Collins and David Sexton, or the former Tory works and pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith.
Look up their gripes for yourselves but here are some snippets:
* Loach…has an absurdly romantic view of benefit claimants. Daniel is a model citizen. At no point do we see him drinking, smoking, gambling, or even watching television. No, he is a welfare claimant as imagined by a member of the upper-middle class metropolitan elite” (Young)
* “Preachy and poorly made. A povvo [ie poverty] safari for middle class people .. misery porn for smug Londoners” (Long)
* “I did think the film has taken the very worst of anything that can ever happen to anybody, lumped it all together, and said ‘this is life’… And I don’t believe that” (IDS)
* "sat awkwardly with a few critics [at Cannes] who felt the film’s determination to more or less frogmarch its audience around to its way of thinking felt less like the stuff of great cinema than the party political broadcast (Collins)
* "That bureaucracy can often be a horror? Yes. That recent changes in the rules about welfare benefits have often inflicted humiliation on claimants? Yes. That we should all move to North Korea pronto? Not so much" (David Sexton)
Loach is a leftie, much more so than I would claim or want to be. But if the worst he has done is to make middle-class people - including many who are also much left-wing than him - consider the plight of the poor and the bureaucratic horrors of a increasingly harsh welfare system, then he deserves praise not ridicule.
Why should Loach tell his tale through the eyes of all the things his character is not? Of course there are shirkers and scroungers trying to pull wool over the eyes of benefits officials.
There are also, according to readily available statistics from the government itself and anecdotal evidence, people who die soon after being told they are fit for work and cannot or cannot any longer receive benefits. Worse single cases from real life, in other words, than the fictional Daniel Blake.
Back to the nub. If IDS or this parade of sneering critics can show that no Daniel Blake situation has existed, or could easily arise under the present system, then they have a point.
If not, and without for a second challenging their right to dislike or distrust the film (sincerely, that is, and not merely to please their masters), then I can but hope the metropolitan middle classes they believe to have been misled by the film are moved to demand change or take personal action to help the poor.
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