Meet Joe Blank: A Recovering Alcoholic Tries The AA Way

MY NAME IS JOE

Directed by Ken Loach

Starring Peter Mullan, Louise Goodall,

Anna-Marie Kennedy, David McKay

Limeys have long had a soft spot for Ken Loach; a recent poll of their island's foremost film critics placed Loach's Kes, a tender story of a boy and his kestrel, way up at number four in Best Film of the Last 30 Or So Years. Although few of us perhaps could say what a kestrel is--even though it is totally the coolest, supposedly able to hover Harrier-like in the air--we would do well to follow the Brit crits' lead: though not the best example, My Name Is Joe is another acceptable slice of Loach's British social realism.

The movie begins as things begin for recovering alcoholic Joe Cavanagh (Mullan), with the regular renewal and ritual therapy of an AA meeting (hence the title). Indulging in a sort of self-forgetting one might expect of someone with a blacked-out past, Joe throws himself into what he calls his family: coaching the local soccer team, a sorry lot of unemployables. Chance encounters and friend Liam lead Joe's path to intersect with social worker Sarah (Louise Goodall), who meets regularly with Liam, his wife and his "wean" (that's "child"; derived from "wee 'un"). Joe helps wallpaper Sarah's house and eventually summons courage to ask her out; relationship follows.

Glasgow--overcast, tenement-filled and shot with a certain indulgence for natural light's gay vicissitudes (i.e., shades of gray and the occasional blinding sunburst)--stars as itself, showing off its social welfare services and those scrappy lower orders who compose both Joe's soccer team and, supplied with worse lines and hence less likable, the local hoodlums. Since Joe practices a strong allegiance to his "family," which includes Liam, and since former addict Liam and addict-at-large Liam's wife play fast and lose with debts to said hoodlums' boss, it's clear that too-willing-to-help Joe could soon get pulled down into the muck again. Once in the muck, he might find drink not far behind.

My Name Is Joe basically traces the implicitly painful and Damoclean progress of the recovering alcoholic. It's not like there are regular scenes of stare-offs with bottles, or moments of temptation and ultimate white-knuckled resolve in front of seedy liquor stores next to check cash-ins. Loach instead wisely lets Joe's successes speak for themselves, their very modesty giving them a fragility; at one point Joe's safe wallpapering gig almost spins into disaster when a welfare agent snaps telephoto pics to expose his outside earnings (Joe paints the agent's car). Mullen's performance is ultranaturalistic and eerily dead-on in a flashback to the bad old days (one of the really few directorial intrusions, narrated in hauntingly matter-of-fact fashion by Mullen).

Needless to say, the whole thing gets horribly depressing. What did you expect? But Mullan evokes Joe's momentary relapse mesmerizingly--the image of a riff opening awesomely to inner infernal domains about describes it--and it's sudden and wrenching, more than a predictable downward spiral style. It's something to look forward to, as a change of pace from the sentimental (though heartfelt) scenes between Goodall and Mullan.

A word about the plot and the criminals. I can't say I know what would be naturalistic or socially real in the underworld, and maybe it's just that all the baddies learn from TV these days anyway (see James Wood's vague gestures toward 70's Scorsese things in Another Day In Paradise). But, offering to help Liam pay a debt to the local hooligan head honcho, Joe does actually get to deliver A Package, ostensibly just driving a car back and forth, and, yes, Joe is not allowed to pull out of the deal once he's In. Just ignore the details and take it for Joe's display of self-sacrifice and still self-respect.

Loach apparently got some clearing-house deal on 80's American TV movie soundtracks--lotta ominous synthesizer chords ganging up on people onscreen without warning sometimes--but, no worries, don't stay home because of that. Stay home if you're expecting anything other than a couple of needy people, one alcoholic (always recovering), one civil servant, trying to match up. It's rough--not stylized--but real. Subtitles and film quality make it feel once in a while like documentary, but a good one. The comic voice finds vent on occasion, too, fortunately not through concerted effort, soccer uniform jokes and all (though the line about Brazil's worth it), but a brash sassiness and the primacy of the Scottish idiom enlivens everything.

You'll get to like Joe, you will; he's a decent, genuinely funny and not in fact always imminently tragic guy (despite my take).

Until, that is, he lies.