★★★★☆
Four Stars
2014 marks the 30th anniversary of one of the fiercest industrial battles in modern British history. Between 1984 and 1985, around 140,000 members of the National Union of Mineworkers came up against the Thatcher government, protesting the privatization of British mines, widespread pit closures, and the loss of tens of thousands of jobs.
The miners were ultimately defeated and the state claimed the incident as a victory. Yet while the strike, and its sad ending, was a dark moment for the British working class, it miraculously gave birth to strong new alliances. During the strike, the miners attracted the support of an unlikely group: the newly formed queer collective, Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners, who saw echoes of their own experiences of subjugation in the miners’ plight.
During the course of the strike, LGSM raised around £20,000 for the miners and their families and visited rural mining communities. Mining groups, in turn, began openly to support LGBT equality rights, and in 1985 it was unanimous support from the National Union of Mineworkers that enshrined support for LGBT rights in the Labour Party’s constitution. Indeed, the real victory of 1985 belonged not to Thatcher’s government, but to the ideal of solidarity.
Pride, the new film by Matthew Warchus, tells the true story of the London Branch of Lesbian and Gays Support the Miners, who threw their support behind a Welsh mining community during the 1984 strike. With equal parts humour and tenderness, the film traces the unlikely friendship between two vastly different groups.
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Pride doesn’t pretend that relations between the notoriously conservative, often homophobic miners and the urban LGBT community were always rosy. What it shows instead is real progress being made between communities that found common ground in dire circumstances.
In one scene, a member of LGSM, Jonathan, played by the wonderful Dominic West (a radical change from his hyper-masculine role as Jimmy McNulty in The Wire) busts out some impressive disco moves at a mining function: the song, fittingly, is entitled ‘Shame’. The heterosexual male citizens of the mining village realize that dancing will be an effective way to pick up women, and shame is transmuted into a bonding experience.
Pride boasts many brilliant performances. Young actors Ben Schnetzer, George Mackay, and Faye Marsay play the enormously likeable LGSM, while Bill Nighy is perfectly understated as an elderly miner. The mining community’s elderly female characters do much to keep the comedy going. Imelda Staunton, who plays smart-as-a-whip, open-minded Hefina, claims many of the film’s best one-liners, and it is a joy to see her laughing hysterically while brandishing an immense pink dildo.
The Welsh countryside makes for beautiful cinema. Long shots of the snow-covered Dulais Valley are a highpoint, as is a scene in which the LGSM group visit an ancient Welsh castle, reminding us that Wales has long and proud traditions that predate and will outlast any Thatcherite oppression.
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There is no shortage of genuine laughs in Pride. At the same time, the film doesn’t gloss over the unsavoury realities of the era. In 2014 we might be horrified that homophobia was once so common in Britain (remember that in 1987 more than half of the English population believed that homosexuality was “always wrong”). Pride also reminds us of the horrors of AIDS, which claimed the lives of far too many brilliant young people.
At the same time, Warchus’s film is about another battle that has been waging for centuries: the fight between capital and labour. It reminds us too that the identity of entire communities can be closely tied to work, and that there is more than just jobs at stake when the state attacks local communities. “The pit and the people,” Bill Nighy’s character tells us, “are one and the same.”
Remember that Margaret Thatcher once proclaimed, “There is no such thing as society.” Pride teaches us that there is something even more important: solidarity. It shows us the true meaning of solidarity, which proves far more valuable than Thatcher’s political victory. The film reminds us that solidarity is not simply synonymous with similarity: it combats difference, and it is built across class and gender boundaries.
It would be easy for a film like Pride to overplay its emotional material or to pluck too insistently at the heartstrings. By retaining enough edge—enough waving dildos and political intensity—Warchus avoids clichés and the pitfalls of sentimentality. Pride is that miraculous thing: a movie that is as hilarious as it is serious, as funny as it is moving, and it will leave you either in well-earned tears, or on your feet in solidarity with the film’s heroes, with fists clenched and raised.
