We're smack in the middle of the annual movie drought. The award bait all came out in late December, but the spring and summer blockbusters aren't being released yet. This leaves us with wannabe blockbusters that didn't make the cut for release at desirable times of year, a few romantic comedies (or, this year, BDSM-lite tales of control and stalkery) released for Valentine's Day, and, apparently,
Hot Tub Time Machine 2 (seriously?). Point being, this might be a good time to stay home and catch up on good movies you missed last year. And have I got a suggestion for you:
Pride.
Consider this less a review than a love letter, a pitch for two hours and one minute of your time.
The historical and political environment of Pride's setting is a familiar one: Margaret Thatcher's Britain, centered on Thatcher's brutal attacks on workers. But if The Full Monty, to name one prominent example, is set after the fight was over, after the factories were closed and the depression had set in, Pride is set in the middle of the fight. The coal miners' strike, specifically. But Pride is a story of solidarity that extends beyond the picket lines and the pits to London's gay bars and pride march. It feels wildly improbable, as you watch, that a group of gay and lesbian activists from London collected thousands of pounds to support striking coal miners in South Wales, and that the mining community ultimately welcomed them in, but it's (mostly) true, and it's the subject of a moving, inspiring, funny, delightful—if tinged with sadness—movie.
"It was a pretty good march today," Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners founder Mark Ashton says on the evening of the 1984 pride march. "Not much in the way of beatings or abuse, hardly any petrol bombs or swastikas. Is it me or are the police getting soft? It's funny, they've stopped hanging around outside our clubs lately. What's that about? D'you think they finally got sick of all that Donna Summer?" This (continued below the fold) is where his pitch—the movie's pitch—for solidarity begins.
My guess is they went somewhere else, to pick on someone else. My guess is that while we're enjoying a temporary reprieve, they're here [holding up a newspaper with the headline "Police clash with miners again"], giving these poor sods the shit we usually get. Now these mining communities are being bullied, just like we are. Right—bullied by the police, bullied by the tabloids, bullied by the government.
Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners ultimately connect with a small mining town in South Wales, and a group of them go to visit, with trepidation on both sides. It offers a lot of material for comedy, but though the miners and their wives have full 1980s British frump on display, they aren't at any point played for cheap laughs. They are fierce, witty, principled, and open to change—well, most of them, eventually. And as the movie shows relationships deepening and support beginning to flow in both directions, the stellar cast—familiar names include Dominic West, Bill Nighy, Paddy Considine, and Imelda Staunton, but less-known actors like Jessica Gunning and Ben Schnetzer are also fantastic—is warm and sweet and funny beyond belief, despite the struggles of the story.
Because the miners lost their fight. Their union isn't gone, but Margaret Thatcher weakened them badly. It is a story of a turning point in the class war from above, an ongoing war that shapes the British and American economies to this day. And for all the advances in LGBT rights the past 30 years have seen, AIDS hangs over any story set in a gay community in 1984.
One of the LGSM members portrayed in the movie said that seeing it for the first time was "difficult, because all I could think about was the people who had died."
But the movie is also about triumph. If solidarity was possible in 1984, a time when British law was that the age of consent for gay people was five years older than the age of consent for straight people, when AIDS was taking off, when the tabloids were, as Ashton observed, painting striking miners in the worst possible light, shouldn't we be able to look for solidarity now? Shouldn't we be able to see common cause despite the generations-old divide-and-conquer tactics of the Margaret Thatchers and Scott Walkers and Chris Christies? That's the beauty of the movie—that as ordinary people we can be braver, we can reach out to each other more, can embrace justice for others as we want it for ourselves.
Also, it's just a funny, fun movie. You could see it just for that reason.