The best thing that can be said about Pride, and this really is a compliment, is that it’s one of the least offensive mainstream movies about queer people and issues that’s yet been made. While most of the cast and above-the-line crew is straight, it probably (read: almost certainly) helped that writer Stephen Beresford is gay. Imagine how Dallas Buyers Club would have turned out if a single person with some direct experience of its subject matter had been involved. The winner of this year’s Cannes’ Queer Palm, Pride seems poised to become 2014’s “it” gay film.
The film is based on a true story and takes place in 1984, as both LGBT rights advocates and striking miners are marching in the streets of Britain. One gay activist, Mark Ashton (Ben Schnetzer), has the idea that the two groups should be marching together, believing that standing in solidarity with the miners will help the cause of the country’s gays and lesbians. Spearheading the Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners campaign, Mark forms an alliance with a small Welsh mining town, donating the money they raise to help pay for the strikers’ needs. The plan faces resistance within both communities, but it turns out that Welsh working-class stiffs and hip young London gays can get along surprisingly well.
You might notice the lack of conflict in that description. Pride is, in fact, a film where actual challenges to the protagonists come in fits and spurts. A stubborn contingent of the town persists in bigotry against LGSM, but that doesn’t come into play until the very end. The movie seeks to maintain interest by using the loose framework of the strike to juggle a myriad of different character-focused subplots. There’s the shy newcomer to the group who struggles with being in the closet. There’s the Welsh housewife who’s trying to assert herself in the community more. There’s Mark’s distress at learning an ex-lover has AIDS. These and more than a dozen other mini-stories occupy just a few minutes of screen time, coming and going at odd times throughout.
Despite its heady subject matter, Pride has a feather-light touch. If it weren’t for some harsh language and the brief appearance of a dildo, it’d be rated PG (stellar work as usual, MPAA). It’s so washy that I’m hard-pressed to find ways to explain how its large cast of talented actors factors into it. Imelda Staunton, Bill Nighy, Dominic West, Paddy Considine, Andrew Scott, and more are all, well, there. They each get at least one little scene in which to shine, even. One could say this makes Pride a true-blue union film, as the whole is more important than the parts. Even Schnetzer, acting in the capacity of leader, isn’t really the focus (although he is talented – dude is American and I had no idea, which is a nice reversal of how it usually goes with English-speaking actors in film industries not their own).
The fact is, the movie eschews any real conflict because its structure is calculated to act as a roller coaster, with some dips of somberness leading up to hills of warmth. These scenes of triumph and “aww” are why the movie exists: to inject some good feeling into the audience with a requisite amount of weepiness thrown in. It’s emotional pornography for the middle-aged.
That might sound harsh, but some of it works pretty well. A lot of the jokes are predicated on a perceived inherent humorousness to small-towners or sweet old ladies having wacky encounters with LGBT culture, which wears out pretty quickly (although a scene in which a bunch of drunken homespun women explore a gay man’s bedroom, capped with Staunton waving about the aforementioned dildo, is rather magnificent). A meeting hall full of people spontaneously bursting into a spirited rendition of an old union song is a genuinely soaring sequence, as long as you embrace that the film is shamelessly twisting your heart’s nipples.
Along the way, Pride picks up and discards some interesting ideas. A pair of lesbians in LGSM are dissatisfied with the gender disparity in the group, and eventually splinter off to form their own organization, at which point the film has no further use for them. Much of the leadership in the town is female, at least, but the movie still perpetuates gay culture as mostly white dudes. That’s not the most “off” aspect, though. While a lot of terrible mainstream LGBT-related movies feature straight saviors learning life lessons from inspirational gay people, Pride flips the dynamic, and in the process, it sort of condescends to the lower class instead. In one scene, LGSM instructs the miners in their rights vis-a-vis interactions with the police (although for all I know, that actually happened and I’m the asshole).
Pride is the very picture of “nice.” It’s a good movie to stream on Netflix on a lazy evening, or to get from Redbox whenever you’re stuck at your parents’ house. It’s bland as a communion wafer, for the most part, but that at least means it goes down easy enough.
One thought on ““Pride””
One of this film’s strongest aspects is that it touches on a lot of subject matters without becoming overbearing in any–specifically the looming HIV crisis, gender dynamics within the gay community, and closeted vs. pride. Queer people juggle all of these issues day-to-day, with each of them taking precedence over the others at any given time so it’s nice to see, for once, that a film can focus on the multitude of issues instead of just one. That being said, the clear issue being addressed in Pride is pride itself, in all its forms and in a variety of communities and sub-communities. I think that’s brilliantly handled here.