Review of Pride (2014) by V H — 09 Nov 2014

The story begins in 1984 London on the day of the gay pride parade. One of the attendees is Joe, a closeted 20-year-old who still lives at home with his parents. Joe is hesitant about marching at first, but soon falls in with a group led by Mark Ashton, just a few years Joe's senior but a born leader.

Mark, inspired by a newscast he saw that morning about an ongoing miners' strike, decides that he and his friends should use the march to collect money to support the miners since both gays and miners are being oppressed by the Thatcher regime. He takes his idea a step further after the parade, forming a small group called Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM) whose members (which include Joe) agree to stand on street corners collecting donations in plastic buckets. But when the miners' union is reluctant to accept money from a gay group, they choose a small mining village in Wales to support directly.

The saving grace of "Pride" is that it's largely true. Mark Ashton was a real person, LGSM was a real organization, and their alliance with a village in Wales really happened. Even though some aspects of the story (the character of Joe, for example) are clearly fictional, the far-fetched notion of a young gay activist choosing to focus his energies on helping a group of small town miners a couple of hundred miles away isn't one of them.

"Pride" touches on just about everything you would expect it to: AIDS, gay bashing, homophobia, coming out. The movie really takes off when the LGSM contingent pays their first visit to their not-very-welcoming beneficiaries. It ends up being a feel-good audience-pleaser that leaves you wondering if the world wouldn't be a better place if it was inhabited mostly by young gays and middle-aged straight women, with perhaps the occasional straight guy who wants to learn how to dance so he can pick up chicks.

Yes it's predictable, yes it has its share of clichés, but this is still a remarkable and even inspiring story that leaves you with the sense that maybe one person really CAN change the world. Not ME of course - I'm far too lazy - but the rest of you should get right on it.