Pride (2014)

A bucket collection becomes a movement, and the film wears its heart on a spotless sleeve. In 1984 a cluster of London lesbians and gay men notice that the police have found new quarry in the striking Welsh miners, so they raise money for a dispute in which they hold no obvious stake. Matthew Warchus directs with brisk, warm competence, and the resulting crowd-pleaser pleases the crowd. The miners are embarrassed to accept the cheque. The activists persist anyway.

On the ledger of social consciousness, the account is unusually full. The plot is a coming-out narrative, a study of homophobia on both sides of the motorway, and a hushed reckoning with the AIDS crisis about to gut the community doing the fundraising. The women of Onllwyn, Hefina and Sian, run the support group and do the shouting, though the film keeps its gaze on class solidarity, not gender warfare. Race is simply absent. The cast is a monochrome slice of 1980s Britain and the screenplay never notices. Nor is there a body-positive subplot, a neurodivergent arc, or a word about the climate, which is refreshing in its way.

The politics are sturdily anti-capitalist, which is unavoidable when the subject is a union crushed by Thatcher and a workforce abandoned by the state. Mark Ashton's communism has been airbrushed into vague rebelliousness, and his surviving comrades have grumbled about it. The film lectures only lightly, preferring uplift to sermonizing, and that restraint works in its favor. It is generous. It is heartfelt. It is the sort of earnest British drama that stacks a beloved cast and lets them do solid work. Nigel Andrews called it a parade on a political correctness unicycle. Most everyone else wept. The classification stands either way.