MY NAME IS JOE (74)

Directed by: Ken Loach

Starring: Peter Mullan, Louise Goodall, David McKay

The Pitch: Inner-city Glasgow : a recovering alcoholic drifts into romance with a middle-class social worker, but finds the pressures of Life frustrating his attempts to stay off the bottle.

Theo Sez: Actually a bit of a disappointment - which only goes to show how high Loach's standards are, and how miraculously the good bits work in this ever-so-slightly conventional drama. It's clear from this and CARLA'S SONG that Paul Laverty isn't in the front rank of Loach collaborators - his script is uninventive, many of the scenes (like Joe's recollection of alcohol-fuelled violence, done in one long speech) formulaic in concept, the focus on slick, posturing gangsters dismaying, even the humour (which mostly works very well) lacking the punch of RIFF-RAFF, sweet rather than acrid. It's all in the handling, the way Loach finesses the script's infelicities - our heroine's discovery of Joe's classical-music tape (look, he's Sensitive) is a pretty stale device, but saved by the cut to her POV, looking out the window at grimy kids playing on the miserable housing estate as Beethoven quavers on ; above all it's in the performances, and in Mullan's magnificent Joe - broken-down but far from pathetic, a forceful, positive person, a doer (he doesn't watch movies because "I can't sit still that long"), fighting trouble ("one of Life's wee adventures"), channelling his aggression ; so that when he buckles, when his eyes go dead and the bitterness comes pouring out, it elevates a rather predictable twist into something unsettling and ferocious. So-so plot, great periphery : its genius isn't in the tender but rather shopworn central romance, it's in the heart-rending detail that surrounds it. The film's best scene - wholly irrelevant to the story - has Goodall talking to a young couple about their baby, asking after its health, showing the husband how to hold it : the man's mountainous bulk, offset by weak, hunted eyes, and the woman's occasional petulance ("I can speak for myself") tell us all we need to know about the fissures and frictions in their relationship - but the way they fuss over the child tells us also that they mean well, try their best, maybe even love each other. Only films can do these things.