A brilliant British film with a charming atmosphere and a fantastic cast. A vintage article from The New Yorker. Happy 1st of May, International Workers’ Day!
In March of 1984, Margaret Thatcher’s government threatened to shut down twenty British coal mines, at which point members of the National Union of Mineworkers went on strike, a wrenching fight that lasted a year. A decade later, the actor and playwright Stephen Beresford heard a startling story about that struggle. The principal players weren’t much on record-keeping, but he managed to reconstruct the events that became the basis of the irresistible new British movie “Pride.” In the early days of the strike, Mark Ashton (Ben Schnetzer), a young gay-rights activist in London, persuades some gay friends to make common cause with the miners. They are both oppressed, he says, beaten by the police and hated by conservatives and the tabloids. After raising money for the strikers, Ashton’s tiny group—seven men and one woman, who call themselves Lesbians & Gays Support the Miners—drive in a brightly decorated yellow-and-orange van to the South Wales mining town of Onllwyn. Under gloomy skies, the Onllwynites greet their guests with varying degrees of warmth, hostility, and astonishment. The question the movie asks is: What is solidarity?
“Pride” is brilliantly entertaining just as it is, so I trust that no one connected with the film will be insulted if I say that, despite the existence of shows with similarly stirring themes, like “Billy Elliot” and “Kinky Boots,” the story would make a terrific musical. In truth, the movie is halfway there already. Beresford and the director, Matthew Warchus, bracket the tale with gay-pride marches in London in 1984 and 1985, but, in general, the picture is short on politics and historical context (there’s almost nothing about the strike itself) and long on comedy, sentiment, and music. As the Londoners imagine entering a mining town, they joke about what they might say to the inhabitants. “May I inquire about your communal baths?” is one gambit. But they sober up when they meet the strikers, who are defiant but very much in need of help. These early meetings have the wariness of two species confronting each other in a marsh. Some of the younger miners, disgusted, want nothing to do with the gays. An elderly woman with a soft face musters her courage and says to a lesbian, “That can’t be true, can it? You’re all . . . vegetarians?” The Londoners are smart, self-deprecating, ironic, and sometimes furious about their own wounds; the miners and their wives and widows can be hearty, even cheery, but, just below the surface, they carry a lifelong bitterness. The two groups are fused by anger and divided by virtually everything else.
Warchus has directed many successful theatrical productions, including musicals, and in this, his first movie in more than a decade, he appears to have an instinctive grasp of film tempo and mood. He moves quickly through crowd scenes and the procedural tasks that the groups perform to build their movement, and then slows down for the personal encounters, many of which are both heart-wrenching and funny. “Pride” has an easy flow and a generous appreciation of vivid temperament and talent of any kind. If you can do something helpful, you’re O.K.—that’s one meaning of solidarity. The actual merger of the two groups, one guesses, was less jaunty than what’s onscreen, but the filmmakers must have thought that this moment, when all hopes were raised, should have the jubilance of a celebratory fable.
Warchus is used to working with large ensemble casts, and he brings young and old actors together with a sure hand. As a veteran union figure, Bill Nighy, with his stalk-like body and his exquisite circumspection, plays a gentle guy who stops being gentle when he sees the cops. Imelda Staunton is the fiery Hefina, who is grateful for L.G.S.M.’s aid and scornful of the local louts who don’t want to accept it. Staunton, so meek in “Vera Drake,” doesn’t merely speak her brazen lines; she launches them, with devastating precision. The dark-eyed American actor Ben Schnetzer has a thrilling youthful ardor as Mark; his inspired, impromptu speeches could actually rouse the audience to dreams of a united front of the insulted and the injured. Warchus makes only one serious mistake: Lisa Palfrey, as the widow Maureen, is so hostile that she seems witchy, even crazy—someone you want to hiss at every time she appears.
The drab, impoverished town could use some pleasure and excitement. When the miners and their families warm to the gays, they do so because the visitors provide practical assistance but also a fresh candor and wit, along with an unfettered attitude toward sex. (“Pits and Perverts” is the name of a London fund-raiser that L.G.S.M. puts on.) Dominic West, who played a corrupt Greek council member in “300” and Detective Jimmy McNulty in “The Wire,” is Jonathan, the oldest in the London group. In a dun-colored meeting hall, he puts on Sylvia Robinson’s seventies disco hit, “Shame, Shame, Shame,” and dances across the tabletops, turning a get-to-know-you event into a joyful uproar. He delivers bread and roses, as the old labor slogan goes.
The gay men and women, for all their strength, have their needs, too. Many of them are estranged from disapproving parents, and they could stand a little affection from an older generation. The two sides shore each other up. But there’s a large irony in the partnership which Beresford and Warchus don’t point out. During the past thirty years, gays have fought their way toward greater equality, but the miners, who were defeated in the 1984-85 strike, have, like other union workers in England and the United States, continued to lose power. “Pride” ends on a note of triumph, but it leaves a long sigh of regret in its wake. Solidarity rarely outlasts the grinding movements of money and power.
A camel’s roar begins as a coarse bellow, degenerates into the rumble of a 1948 Chevy cranking over, and ends as the sound of water gurgling through a drainpipe. The beasts are unharmonious and changeable—smart, playful, and loving at times, though the male of the species, while rutting, can turn vicious. In “Tracks,” a movie derived from Robyn Davidson’s 1980 memoir of adventure in the outback, an angry bull camel charges, and Robyn (Mia Wasikowska) brings him down with a rifle shot—something that is particularly hard for her to do, because she loves animals far more than she loves people. The year is 1977, and Robyn, aged twenty-six, has set out to walk from Alice Springs, in central Australia, to the Indian Ocean, a distance of some seventeen hundred miles. The camels, a holdover from the nineteenth century, when they were imported from Arabia, India, and Afghanistan to carry goods across the desert, make the attempt possible—with National Geographic, which provides some funding. No white woman has done such a thing before, and Robyn needs to prove to herself that she can do it with minimal human help. She does it with less than full animal help, too, loading the camels with supplies but then walking rather than riding.
The memoir is strongly written, and I wish that the movie, directed by John Curran (Marion Nelson did the adaptation), had more excitement to it. Early on, there are terse, bustling scenes of Robyn arriving in Alice Springs without money, working as a barmaid, and apprenticing herself to some old camel wranglers, encrusted and filthy, whom she wins over with her stamina and her bravery. Once she launches into the reddish-brown desert, however, the movie falls into what can only be called a righteous monotony. Robyn is not a victim of accident, like Tom Hanks, in “Cast Away,” or Robert Redford, in “All Is Lost.” She chooses her solitary fate in an act of self-transcending defiance. In a sexist society, like that of the Australia of forty years ago, she’s certainly heroic—everyone thinks she’s strange. But her obsession doesn’t have the variety and depth that would make her a continuously interesting movie subject. Robyn walks across the desert because she wants to—that’s all—and Curran’s use of the landscape is too prosaic to fill in the blank spaces in her temperament. (In the book, it’s Davidson’s skill as a writer that holds you.)
The slight Wasikowska is a capable, pure-spirited actress, but she lacks the largeness of desire and the perversity that, say, Charlize Theron would have brought to the role a decade ago. The loose-limbed, grinning Adam Driver shows up as Rick Smolan, a National Geographic photographer assigned to the trip, who’s constantly hopping around her to get the best angle. Robyn falls into his arms when she’s in despair, and then treats him with indifference in the morning. It’s solitude that she wants. She despises tourists, or anyone with a camera, but, as Rick points out to her when she fends him off, the magazine paid her for the trip, so what did she expect? Perhaps only naïve men and women have the single-mindedness to perform such feats as a seven-month desert trek, but that single-mindedness cuts Robyn off from other people and, finally, from us as well. ♦
Published in the print edition of The New Yorker, September 29, 2014, issue.
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