Pride (2014)
Some of the best stories are the ones you can scarcely believe are true, and Pride is built on a beauty. In the summer of 1984, a small group of gay and lesbian activists in London looked at the striking miners being ground down by Margaret Thatcher's government, recognised a shared enemy in the establishment and the tabloid press, and began raising money for them under the cheerfully blunt banner of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners. Matthew Warchus's film tells the story of the wary, funny, deeply moving alliance that grew out of that decision, and it is, for my money, one of the finest British films I have ever seen.
That is not a claim I make lightly. I have a fairly high bar for films I would call genuinely great rather than just very good, and Pride clears it with room to spare. What Warchus has done here is take a piece of history that ought to be far better known than it is, and turned it into something that feels simultaneously urgent and warm, angry and joyful. It is a film about solidarity, about prejudice on multiple fronts, and about what happens when people who have every reason to distrust each other decide to look past it and find common cause instead.
A film like this lives or dies on its ensemble, and this one is stacked. Ben Schnetzer is all fire and charm as the young activist Mark Ashton, driving the whole enterprise forward with a kind of infectious, righteous energy. There is a gruff, gorgeous warmth from the likes of Bill Nighy and Imelda Staunton as the Welsh villagers slowly won over, their initial suspicion giving way to something altogether more generous. And a young George MacKay, a few years before he would carry 1917 almost single-handed, is quietly lovely here as a closeted lad finding his feet, giving you a character whose journey you feel every step of without him ever asking you to notice how well he is doing it. It is that kind of cast, full of people doing excellent work without drawing attention to it.
The soundtrack is a joy, all eighties defiance and dancefloor energy, and Warchus, a man of the theatre, stages the big set-pieces of song and speech with a real crowd-pleasing swell. He knows when to go big, and more importantly, he knows how to earn it. These moments hit because the film has done the character work first.
What might so easily have been worthy is instead an absolute joy. It confronts prejudice head-on, on both sides of the alliance, without once tipping into a lecture, and it paints a vivid, angry, big-hearted picture of a Britain in which ordinary people found unlikely common cause against those in power. It is that increasingly rare thing: a feel-good film with something real to say, one that earns its uplift rather than manufacturing it. I came away both moved and grinning, which is not a pairing many films manage to pull off.
My one real complaint is that I wanted more of the aftermath. The film gestures at how the miners returned the solidarity, throwing their weight behind gay rights in the years that followed, but it is a story so remarkable that I would gladly have sat through another half hour of it. The ending rather hurries past one of history's great acts of reciprocity, and that feels like a missed opportunity. But that is a small quibble about a film I adored, and nowhere near enough to knock it from its perch.
This is a piece of British history that took far too long to reach the screen, and it was more than worth the wait. Four and a half stars, and if you have somehow managed to miss it, please put that right this weekend.
Rating: ★★★★½ | Year: 2014 | Watched: 2026-08-18
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
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Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
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