Okay, got my audience rant out of the way up front. Joe is really a stunning movie, funny, warm, melancholy, aching. It's from ultra-realist director Ken Loach, and it's subtitled -- the Scottish accents are that impenetrable (thank god they didn't dub it with American voices, like they did with Mad Max). Peter Mullan, as the unemployed, recovering alcoholic Joe, is quietly sensational. He's very unactorly, eschewing showy histrionics to create a sublimely natural portrait of a good man in a bad world.
The first half of the movie is sweet and light as Joe banters in a Newman-Redford-esque way with his best friend Shanks, coaches a ragtag youth soccer team, and falls for a health clinic nurse. But things turn suddenly dark, though if you consider the prevalence of alcohol and drugs, poverty and violence, it's surprising the film maintained such a light tone up to that point. The awful events of the climax feel inevitable, even as you wish they weren't. The movie just kind of ends, leaving things hanging, which let us reassure Tiffany that in the part we don't get to see, things work out just fine.
A couple minor complaints: the music is distractingly bad, too slapsticky for the light scenes and too self-importantly ponderous for the dark ones. Also, they desperately need proofreaders for their subtitles (and oddly, they sometimes translate Scottish slang expressions to something more understandable... and sometimes don't).
I highly recommend this film.
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