Matthew Warchus (2014)
Twenty minutes into Pride, Sally asked if I could stand any more and I said that I thought I could. It was already obvious that Stephen Beresford’s script had plenty of crummy lines and mechanical subplots but no less clear that the cast included people doing interesting things in spite of the screenplay. We stayed and were both glad that we did. Pride arrives in cinemas already carrying the stigma of the ‘feelgood British movie of the year’ (although there’s usually more than one) but, in this case, the description is apt enough, even if you take issue with the means used by Beresford and Matthew Warchus – a big name in the theatre but directing only his second feature film here (and his first since Simpatico in 1999) – to achieve this. Most of the actors are admirable; two of them – Imelda Staunton and Andrew Scott – are outstanding. I’m still surprised, though, that Pride, as well as thriving at the British box office, has generated such critical enthusiasm on both sides of the Atlantic: I think this has more to do with its subject than with how entertaining it turns out to be.
Pride is based on the true story of how a group of gay activists supported the miners’ strike of 1984-85 and of the partnership that developed between Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM) and the Neath, Dulais and Swansea Valley Miners Support Group. (The LGSM activists are based in London – specifically in the Gay’s The Word premises in Marchmont Street.) The film is a comedy-drama: the balance of the two elements naturally depends on how much either gay activism or the NUM strike is considered potentially a laughing matter and the former is clearly seen by Warchus and Beresford to be a better comic bet. There are no laughs on the subject of AIDS, which casts a predictable shadow over some of Pride‘s characters. (It’s either a gross error or a piece of manipulative dramatic licence that at one point Matthew Warchus shows a television screen broadcasting the notorious ‘Don’t Die of Ignorance’ public health advertisement, voiced by John Hurt: this didn’t appear until 1986, outside the timeframe of the film.) But, as a movie like Gus van Sant’s Milk (2008) has already illustrated, the camp/bitchy verbal tendencies of campaigning gay men can help take the tiresomely earnest edge off political engagement on screen – and Warchus and Stephen Beresford certainly exploit this (to put it mildly).
The industrial action is a different matter. Earlier films rooted in the miners’ strike of the mid-eighties – such as Brassed Off (1996) and Billy Elliot (2000) – have made clear that it’s verboten for British cinema to make jokes about the strike as such, although it’s OK to develop a story with comic elements arising from it. In Pride, several of the Welsh contingent are often meant to be funny – but almost exclusively in terms of their response to the arrival of gay activists in the village (it’s difficult, in the early stages anyway, not to be reminded of Llanddewi Brefi in Little Britain) and to accepting strike funds raised by LGSM. The mining community are also sometimes supposed to be comical because they speak in those funny Welsh accents; and Stephen Beresford continues the long, tired tradition of trying to get laughs through the use of unglamorous English place names – Accrington, Bromley, etc. After not very long, the audience is primed for double entendres (usually ropy ones) – to such an extent that, when the LSGM van has a delayed journey to Dulais and, on the gays’ eventual arrival there, the host Dai says, ‘I thought you were never coming!’, people in the Red Lion Street Odeon started automatically to laugh. Then seemed to think again: maybe Dai did just mean that he thought they were never going to arrive …
Pride begins and ends with Gay Pride marches in London, twelve months apart. A large contingent of miners’ groups from across South Wales are in the vanguard of the concluding 1985 march and a series of closing legends explains that NUM support was crucial in passing a motion at the Labour Party Conference of the following year in support of equal rights for gay men and lesbians. This confirmation of the importance of the partnership forged between LGSM and the NUM doesn’t make sense in the context of the film’s narrative. There’s been no suggestion that the partnership has extended beyond the particular LGSM group featured and the community in Neath. Even this relationship is derailed temporarily when an embittered Dulais woman called Maureen phones The Sun to tell them what’s going on, resulting in negative publicity. (Just as the character played by Bryce Dallas Howard in The Help turned out to be the sole irredeemable racist in the community so Maureen appears to be the only-homophobe-in-the-village – once, that is, the other locals realise that gays-are-all-right-once-you-get-to-know-them.) Given the sledgehammer touch of most of the writing, Warchus and Beresford are either surprisingly discreet[1] or evasive or careless about some important elements in the story. Are we meant to assume that – apart from Joe, the youngster who skives catering college, and Gethin, who runs Gay’s the Word – all the LGSM activists are unemployed because they live in Thatcher’s Britain? They certainly have plenty of time on their hands. And while the gay rights movement went from strength to strength in the years that followed, many mining communities withered in the wake of the 1984-85 strike: even if the film-makers are making the dubious assumption that everyone in the audience knows this, shouldn’t the ‘feelgood’ ending of Pride be qualified in acknowledgement of the fact? It is acknowledged that the female members of LGSM are very few: there are three of them. But rather than explaining why – exploring whether the boys don’t want the girls to join in – the film irritatingly makes two of the lesbians cartoon figures of fun simply because they want a separate women’s group in support of the miners.
Pride describes how Mark Ashton, the prime mover in LGSM, organises the ‘Pits and Perverts’ benefit, held in the Electric Ballroom in Camden in December 1984. He visits a record company in an attempt to enlist their support. A receptionist there tells him that they have no gay artists on their books and Matthew Warchus cuts ironically to huge images of Elton John and Soft Cell at the entrance to the company’s offices. It’s true that Elton John was married to a woman at the time (although he’d come out as bisexual as far back as 1976). It’s true too that Marc Almond has been quoted as saying (relatively recently) that he doesn’t like being pigeon-holed as a gay artist – but, if this is meant to be an example of someone whose sexuality was being submerged or concealed for commercial reasons in 1984, Almond is a surprising choice: surely he was assumed by the general public to be gay from the moment they saw him performing ‘Tainted Love’ in 1981? The songs on the soundtrack that’s been released in conjunction with Pride are a fine collection, reflecting the singles riches of the period the story covers (give or take a year or two: ‘West End Girls’, for example, is included). Unless my deafness is getting worse than I realise, quite a few of the songs on the Pride album aren’t, however, heard during the film itself.
I’ve left the actors until last because I want, in spite of all these reservations about Pride, to end on a note that’s not merely positive but gets across how much I enjoyed watching the film. George MacKay is Joe (aka ‘Bromley’), the catering college student who’s sexually a minor when the film begins and turns twenty-one before it ends. When Joe first goes into a gay club on the night of the 1984 Gay Pride march he looks mainly terrified but with just a hint of excitement. Andrew Scott is Gethin, a Welshman who hasn’t been home for twelve years because his mother can’t tolerate his sexuality. ‘There’s not always a welcome in the hillside,’ he explains: it’s a cringeworthy line but the way Scott swallows after ‘hillside’ redeems it. Imelda Staunton is the doughty, funny Hefina Headon, a motherly stalwart of the mining community. Hefina is a member of the Dulais welcoming committee that lines up to meet their LGSM visitors. Staunton is at the end of the line, standing straight and small, with her large bosom suggesting a barricade of initial suspicion. It was alchemical moments like these from her, Scott and MacKay early on that made me think Pride would be worth staying with. It’s great to see Andrew Scott seizing the opportunity to register in a cinema film. His emotional dynamism is wonderful and makes for some affecting scenes – even the one in which Gethin eventually goes back home, the door opens and he says, ‘Hello, Mum’, although it’s typical of the script that the mother then appears to accept Gethin’s being gay without any further difficulty. The plotting of Joe’s family’s discovery that he’s gay is desperately clumsy and unconvincing but George MacKay stays truthful. Monica Dolan is tenacious in nuancing the character of Joe’s mother for much longer than the writing of it deserves, although even she has to concede defeat in the ludicrous climax to this subplot, when Joe arrives late for a family christening party and the suburban Bromley gathering is scandalised by the LGSM van in which he rolls up. Imelda Staunton’s portrait of Hefina Headon (who died in 2013) is a delight – it’s very satisfying watching her score a direct hit with her every moment on screen. Whatever she does – whether expressing the moral heart of the story or making you laugh – is always anchored in character.
Not everyone is a success: I like Dominic West but it was clear from the film’s trailer that, whether he was playing a miner or a gay activist (it wasn’t too clear which), he was miscast. West turns out to be Gethin’s partner, Jonathan Blake (the second case of AIDS to be diagnosed in Britain, so he says, and still alive today, according to the film’s closing legends). I gave West the benefit of the doubt for a couple of scenes, prepared to accept that his actorish quality conveyed the character of the long-resting thespian that Jonathan is meant to be. But it’s soon evident that West is awkward in the role. His big moment, when Jonathan lets rip in a vigorous disco dance routine, comes across as an expression of the actor’s relief that he can lose his inhibitions for a few screen minutes (though it’s still a bit embarrassing to watch). However, Bill Nighy, of whom I’m not usually a fan, gives a strong and subtle performance as Cliff, a dignified, elderly miner who’s been a repressed homosexual for decades – another clichéd idea rescued by the actor concerned. As Dai, Paddy Considine is intelligently and amusingly restrained. The young American actor Ben Schnetzer isn’t an engaging presence but his playing of the determined, somewhat humourless Mark Ashton seems very right. Ashton, from Northern Ireland, was a well-known gay and political activist, who died in his mid-twenties, in 1987, shortly after being diagnosed with AIDS. Russell Tovey is electrifying in a cameo as an ex-boyfriend of Mark, already dying of the disease. In the larger supporting role of Ashton’s loyal partner, Mike, Joseph Gilgun is, as usual, excellent (not least because he makes Mike not in the least effeminate). There are fewer opportunities for the women in the cast. Lisa Palfrey, who plays Maureen, has an impossible task but Faye Marsay does well as Steph (the one non-risible lesbian in evidence). Liz White is quietly effective in the small role of Dai’s wife; Menna Trussler is her usual amusing self as the innocent Gwen; and Jessica Gunning is really good as Sian James (now the Labour MP for Swansea East). I also liked Rhodri Meilir as Sian’s husband, Martin. Matthew Warchus doesn’t strike you, on the evidence of Pride, as a natural film-maker but he sure can direct actors.
22 September 2014
[1] Is the ‘I am (discretely) gay’ lapel badge that one character gives another an historical artefact or poor spelling on the part of someone in the film crew?