British filmmaker Ken Loach, up to his elbows again in the proverbial kitchen sink, arranges an across-the-great-divide romance between an on-the-dole and on-the-wagon (hence the title, in the form of the AA salutation) volunteer soccer coach and a genteel middle-class social worker, who happen to have a mutual interest in one young soccer player with a junkie wife, a four-year-old child, and a debt to the mob. The illusion of reality remains as strong as ever, shored up by the unfamiliarity of some very skillful performers -- Peter Mullan, Louise Goodall, David McKay, Anne-Marie Kennedy -- not to mention the unfamiliarity of the Glaswegian dialect. (The English subtitles, sometimes a word-for-word transcription, sometimes a gloss, oftentimes a mere gimmick, are at least as big a distraction as they are a help.) But for all the convincing air of reality, even the occasionally oppressive air of dullness, the movie is nonetheless a manipulative and conventional piece of work, complete with a meet-cute (rolls of wallpaper, twice in one day, tumbling out of the back of the woman's car in the man's vicinity) and arm-twisting underworld melodrama. The lack of resolution may be perfectly true to life, but it's not true to the contrivance. (1998) — Duncan Shepherd
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