The Angels' Share (2012)

Ken Loach has spent five decades cataloguing the ways Britain grinds down its poor, and The Angels' Share finds him in an unusually forgiving mood. Robbie, a Glasgow father with a newborn and a family feud, is sentenced to community payback, where he and three fellow offenders discover malt whisky and, eventually, a heist. The target is a cask of Malt Mill valued beyond reason, and the scheme amounts to a redistribution of wealth performed with an Irn-Bru bottle. The class politics are unmistakable. Wealthy collectors and auctioneers exist to be fleeced, and the film asks us to cheer. This is the Loach thesis rendered as a caper, a more agreeable delivery mechanism than his customary method.

The ensemble is drawn from working-class Glasgow, populated with locals and non-professionals in pursuit of texture, not a diversity quota. The result is a cast that is almost uniformly white and Scottish, which is regional authenticity and nothing more. Mo and Leonie appear and occasionally act, but the picture belongs to the lads and to Robbie's redemption, and no feminist argument is mounted. Race, climate, disability, and body image are absent as subjects. Loach's concerns have always been narrower and older than the contemporary cultural checklist, and he shows no interest in acquiring newer ones here.

As sermons go, this one is warm. The critique is folded into whisky, banter, and a Proclaimers needle drop, so the audience absorbs the politics without noticing the lecture. It is a crowd-pleaser with a conscience, and the conscience is the sixty-year-old kind about class, not the newer kind about identity. A pleasant evening at the cinema, and a mild entry for the classification ledger.