Just out from seeing Pride in the pictures. You know, it isnt all that funny and its sometimes a bit heavy handed, but it is a beautiful film. I cried for large parts of it: especially when Gethin went home to see his Mum for the first time in 16 years. The lead character is Mark Ashton, who I couldnt believe was played by an American called Ben Schnetzer. His accent was perfect: an Ulster Prod boy who escaped to London as soon as he could with no reason to look back, a softened Belfast brogue with the terminal Rs faded away to a South East English vowel. It probably doesnt mean much if youre not from Northern Ireland, but its rare a Belfast accent on the Big Screen is anything other than ludicrous. A perfect Anglified Belfast accent is almost impossible for an American actor: Schnetzer clearly went to serious lengths to bring this larger than life man back from the dead. For Mark Ashton died far too young, in 1987 aged just 26, of HIV-AIDS. And I cried more for all the boys who died too young, the boys from Belfast and Barnsley who fled homophobia to London just like the boys who fled Bakersfield and Boise and queued up on the steps of Cleve Jones office in San Francisco at the same time, with the same strange bruises and swollen glands, afraid and alone and knowing they were going to die. I cried for the tens of thousands of lives that could still be being lived now, loving and making life better for hundreds of thousands of others. And I almost cried for the death of Socialism. I dont think Ive been a Socialist since I was at school. I rejected it for the same reasons as others reject Christianity: it would be a lovely idea if it worked, but it doesnt and many of its adherents live lives a long way from its principles. The smart and tolerant miners are tragic heroes, but the film, like the British Left generally, never questions the donkeys who led the lions. Power games and egos led to the idiocy of starting a coal strike in April. Yet what is left in Socialisms absence? What gives hope on the estates and what were once the pit villages, or in the flats above the shops in supposedly idyllic places like Salisbury and Dorchester? Who promises a better future to people in Weymouth, a town of crippling rents where over half the population has only part time work, giving lie to the myth that the flexible economy is a choice? Is there an alternative to the world of zero-hours contracts with no pensions and no security? And thats why Pride is so beautiful. One might lose the war, but battles can always be won, battles that change peoples lives, immeasurably, for the better. Utopia means no such place in Greek: it does not exist. But each of us has the power to make our own lives, and those of others, better. Thats the central message of the film: we can all still win even when the war is lost. In the face of death, resurrection. Mark Ashton, who died too young will live for ever on the Silver Screen, but still more in the lives he transformed. Please go and see Pride. If nothing else youll have a good cry.
Posted on: Thu, 25 Sep 2014 22:09:38 +0000
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