Pride…

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~Friday~  Bob requested Pride (2014) from NetFlix and invited me to watch it with him.

I didn’t know anything about this movie, except that it was gay-themed and in the theaters last year.

The synopsis

Based on a true story, the film depicts a group of lesbian and gay activists who raised money to help families affected by the British miners’ strike in 1984, at the outset of what would become the Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners campaign. The National Union of Mineworkers was reluctant to accept the group’s support due to the union’s public relations’ worries about being openly associated with a gay group, so the activists instead decided to take their donations directly to Onllwyn, a small mining village in Wales, resulting in an alliance between the two communities. The alliance was unlike any seen before.

The trailer

My thoughts and observations

  • I enjoyed this film, mostly because it enlightened me about some gay history that I wasn’t previously aware of.
  • There were things in it there were predictable and stereotypical, but certainly not anywhere near enough to make it unbearable.
  • Themes touched on:
    • Empathy
    • Solidarity
    • Pride—in its many manifestations, including being who you are and what you’ve become, and pride in humanity occasionally rising to an occasion
    • Prejudice—in its many manifestations, including social class and sexual orientation
    • Activism
    • Family dynamics and dysfunction
    • AIDS
    • How the impact of meeting people who are not like you (in a number of ways) in person can teach you more than you’ll ever learn on TV or in a book
    • Faith in humanity
    • Doing the right thing even if it’s hard
    • “Going home”
  • There were enough laugh-out-loud funny moments in the film to add some lightness to an otherwise serious topic. A couple that quickly come to mind include:
    • When Steph (played by Faye Marsay), as the only female member of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM), asserts herself as the “L” in LGSM two or three times in less than a minute when someone is talking about the group and referring to them as “the gays.”
    • Several lines of Gwen (played by Menna Trussler), including “I’m hoping you can clear something up for me about Lesbians…,” “Guys, your gays have arrived…,” and “Where are my Lesbians?
  • I gave this movie one-and-a-half thumbs up. For me at least, it was more than one, but not quite up to two.

Have you seen this movie? If so, what did you think of it?
 

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