Voice of the Voiceless: Paul Laverty is One of the Best Writers Working Today
Ken Loach’s in-house storyteller is an (inter)national treasure.
I recently caught The Olive Tree, a stratospherically terrific gem that’ll likely bypass most critics’ end-of-year lists purely because, well, no one really knew it was coming out. A downright shame; its emotional intelligence and levity deserves to be seen by everyone. Fundamentally a family drama and road movie smushed together, for me it ranks as one of the best of the year so far, but not until the credits rolled did I realise I found the screenwriter’s name familiar: Paul Laverty. Scrolling through his IMDb, it’s clear that he’s a voice for the voiceless.
A Ken Loach stalwart, he most recently penned last year’s Palme d’Or winner I, Daniel Blake, not to mention Loach’s previous gold leaf grabber, 2006’s The Wind That Shakes the Barley. His long-standing working relationship with the much-celebrated director means that, by default, his art is going to manifest itself as scripture for the masses; working-class men and women dominate his stories, in which his characters fight real-world battles and overcome looming establishments. But Laverty never opts for the stale mentality of ‘us-versus-them’; his writing truly shines when finding the inherent complexities of such conflicts.
The Olive Tree marks a further collaboration with director Icíar Bollaín, following the outstanding Even the Rain from 2010 (the two are, as it happens, in a relationship with one another). Removed from the Loach school of exciting ideological spittle, Laverty is still clearly focused on David-and-Goliath stories; but with Bollaín, the threads of his stories take root in different cultures instead of a single community, and spread themselves over decades, not the short timeframes of Loach’s cinema. Illuminating the many sparks when different worlds clash is Laverty’s forte: In Even the Rain, film director Sebastián (played by the always-incredible Gael García Bernal) is having a tough time convincing a group of non-actors to dip their fake babies into a pond, pretending to drown them as had happened in a dark time in Bolivian history. They deny him, and walk off set without a word. Sebastián, whose life is comfortable and whose work deals in artifice, doesn’t understand why they simply can’t just pretend to do it; perhaps they believe that the symbolism is the same as the act itself. But Laverty never gives us a concrete reason for their departure: he’s aware that there are aspects of different cultures beyond our own understanding, at least at first. He doesn’t talk down to us by giving clear reasons. He doesn’t judge. The same can be said for The Olive Tree, where we’re shown a Spanish family struggling with concepts of heritage and legacy that would seem perhaps quaint or straight-up ludicrous to most Westerners. In both movies, the small voices that believe in something greater than themselves — it could be family, nature, religion — rise up to speak against the systems that are silencing them, knowingly or unwittingly.
Ultimately, Laverty isn’t interested in giving the voiceless a voice. He’s interested in showing us they’re already screaming at the top of their lungs — and long may he continue.
