The union side includes Hefina (Imelda Staunton), a gung-ho, unflappable organizer who enthusiastically welcomes the gay contingent, and Cliff (Bill Nighy), the union’s polite, haltingly shy secretary. The gay supporters, besides Mark and Jonathan, include Jonathan’s lover, Gethin (Andrew Scott), who grew up in Wales, fled to London and hasn’t been home since, and Joe (George MacKay), a shy, semi-closeted college student.
Stephen Beresford’s evenhanded screenplay has a lot of ground to cover and more characters than it can comfortably handle, but it manages to humanize almost everyone.
#GAY PRIDE NYC 2018 TIME FULL#
“Pride,” unlike “The Full Monty,” isn’t a comedy, but laughs are harvested from the collision of macho working-class miners in South Wales and young Londoners, mostly male, who gather at a gay bookstore. That film tradition was revived in the late 1990s with “The Full Monty,” a celebration of working-class ingenuity in which six unemployed steelworkers in Sheffield form a striptease act to raise money. In a TV clip, Thatcher is shown baring her teeth in a feral smile, her eyes gleaming, as she vows to crush the National Union of Mineworkers. But the enemy here, the conservative government of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, is within rather than without.
“Pride” is a descendant of morale-boosting British World War II movies that celebrated people pulling together in hard times.
#GAY PRIDE NYC 2018 TIME MOVIE#
The movie accentuates the positive without descending into mawkish sentimentality, although here and there it comes close.
Directed by Matthew Warchus (“Matilda the Musical”), it is the kind of hearty, blunt-force drama with softened edges that leaves audiences applauding and teary-eyed.Ĭontributing to its appeal are that the story is based on actual, though little-known, events that its heroes and villains are clear-cut and that its tone is resolutely upbeat but not pie-in-the-sky feel-good. The classic union anthem “Solidarity Forever,” sung by Pete Seeger, introduces “Pride,” a stirring film about the uneasy coalition of British mineworkers and gay and lesbian activists during a labor strike in the mid-1980s.