Pride Review

Feel-good movies are easily dismissed, and often derided by "serious" movie-goers as pandering crowd-pleasers that lack bite or perspective.  They go down easy, and leave audiences with the sense of having done something good, something worthwhile, of coming out of the theater a better person, somehow, despite the passive experience that happened within.  There are cinephiles who get off on challenging fare, movies that are brash, harsh, and tough.  The more enigmatic and brutal, the better.  Indeed, many of the best movies fall into this latter camp: art can be, and often should be, hard to swallow and even harder to shake.  But for a movie to both lighten and enlighten its audience is a rare thing, and a lovely one, when it happens.

Most of the descriptors and phrases people throw out about feel-good movies, I want to employ in the service of Matthew Warchus's transcendent Pride.  This review could easily descend into a parade of cliche, and it would be utterly genuine.  While watching Pride, I laughed and cried (I was on the verge of ugly-loud-crying numerous times), I wanted to stand up and cheer, and I left the screening room with a bounce in my step.  It's a crowd-pleaser of the very finest quality, like The King's Speech but with more timely subject matter, and more relatable, dealing as it does with common people rather than stuttering royalty.

Pride is the first queer movie of its kind.  Most stories of sexual minorities end tragically, or at least on a bittersweet note.  The romantic highs of Blue is the Warmest Color and Brokeback Mountain are fleeting, and must come crashing down to crushing lows.  It makes sense that many gay and lesbian pictures are such downers, what with a history of persecution, the gray cloud of the AIDS epidemic ever looming in recent memory, and regular rejection by society, friends, and family.  Unrequited love, the agony of coming out, death.  These are the usual orders of the day, when a protagonist isn't a straight white male in love with a straight white female.  But not so here.  Pride is buoyant, rousing, and colorful.  This movie is here, it's queer, and it feels so good.

Which isn't to say that Pride skirts around the darker aspects of being a sexual minority.  Quite the opposite, in fact.  The characters represent a broad spectrum of sexual experiences.  The advent of AIDS looms over some scenes.  One character remains deeply closeted despite being on the front lines of political activism.  Another shudders at the thought of reuniting with his mother, fearing that she will still reject him, as she did when he first came out.  But none of these fearful, troubling truths of existence drown out the joy of being alive, in love, active, and passionate.  In a way, Pride is like a feature-length It Gets Better spot, not in its narrative, per se, but certainly in its tone, and its optimism.

What makes it even better is that Pride is based on a true story.  Screenwriter Stephen Beresford has done a brilliant bit of detective work in unearthing this forgotten slice of history.  Pride follows a group of lesbians and gay men who raise support for a small mining town in the midst of the strike against Margaret Thatcher's government.  It's an unlikely alliance, but Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM) becomes a lifeline to the town, and a bastion of compassion.  They had previously been targeted by police brutality and unfair treatment by the government; they understand the miners better than anyone else.

Of course, the queers aren't welcomed with open arms, but the way the two communities grow together is carefully and lovingly depicted.  Pride features a smorgasbord of great actors, from veteran greats like Bill Nighy (subtly heartbreaking) and Imelda Stauton (one of the funniest of the vast ensemble) to younger talents like the adorably bumbling George MacKay.  The characters often directly defy expected stereotypes, with elderly women embracing their wild, youthful friends, and the queer characters - save the notable exception of the supremely entertaining Jonathan (Dominic West in a scene-stealing turn) - far from flamboyant.  MacKay's Joe is told that life as a homosexual is lonely; Pride's lovely, varied community of characters proves that nothing is further from the truth.

Beresford's script is bright and funny, never wallowing in the misery of being persecuted or excluded.  That the dialogue is so sharp, and the characters so upbeat despite their circumstances, makes the injustice all the more glaring, and the film's tender moments all the more moving.  A stunning group singalong of Mimi Farina and Jess Oppenheim's Bread and Roses is almost too beautiful to bear, and a perfect microcosm of the solidarity that serves as Pride's galvanizing theme.   It's only one instance of the powerful ensemble coming together to make magic, and one example of the film's perfect soundtrack, which features plenty of great eighties music from the likes of The Smiths and Culture Club.

Amongst the castles of the UK, and within a genre that often feels tired, Pride signals a new day.  An unlikely alliance of downtrodden outcasts stood up to an imposing, all-powerful infrastructure, resulting in a giddy instance of sticking it to the man - or woman, as it were.  In recounting this story, and celebrating the band of everyday heroes who wouldn't stay down when they were kicked and beaten and pushed aside, Warchus and Beresford have blessed us with hope not only for greater tolerance and unity in our future, but for greater variety and jubilation in the future of queer film.  That's something to be proud of.