I’m not a good enough person to unreservedly enjoy “Pride,” Matthew Warchus’s vigorous and inspirational film about a group of London-based gay activists who, during the British coal miners’ strike of 1984-85, raised money for the strikers and then travelled to a town in the Welsh countryside to offer their support in person. These were two groups of British people who were suffering at the hands of the government and society at large. Gays were enduring age-old discrimination on moral and religious grounds; working people were losing their livelihoods and their political influence. I wholeheartedly share the values on which the movie trades—the advocacy of complete legal and social equality and respect for gay people, and the belief that the well-being of working people should be fostered and protected by law—but that very sense of a celebration of shared values is part of the problem.
“Pride” leaves me feeling targeted. It conveys the filmmakers’ apparent presumption that the art-house audience and the critics who are part of that audience share the movie’s values. I’m pleased when the world at large acts to advance those values and angry when it doesn’t. But I’m not sufficiently pleased to see a movie like “Pride” that only reinforces my values. Values aren’t the same thing as art, and the filmmakers’ confidence in their just causes leads to an aesthetic complacency. The self-satisfied banner of virtue does those liberal values no good in the arena of ideas. This viewpoint turns “Pride” into a debonair, good-humored counterpart to the crude rants of right-wing television and talk radio—a sermon that won’t go beyond the congregation of true believers.
Artistic style and invention are what leave their mark in minds and in eras. Bland advocacy of the sort that “Pride” charmingly represents gets thrown away with yesterday’s newspapers. There’s no artistic audacity of any sort in “Pride,” and its lack of invention is an essential part of its calculated appeal. Invention involves risk—including the risk of alienation, of pushing ideas toward their contradiction, of searching beyond common grounds and entering one’s own private obsessions. This is exactly what’s found in another movie about striking Welsh miners and local moralists that came to mind as I watched “Pride”: John Ford’s 1941 drama “How Green Was My Valley,” the movie rendered infamous as the one that beat out “Citizen Kane” for Best Picture; Ford also won Best Director over Welles.
Ford’s film is rich in invention, which is inseparable from provocation. It, too, is a historical film—it’s set in an unspecified time in the late nineteenth century—but it’s framed as a work of memory, as a man recalls what he saw and experienced as a boy at the time of the strike. The shift in perspective sets up a painful paradox—the story becomes an elegy for the man’s late father (played by Donald Crisp), whose enduring wisdom and rightness of judgment the adult now recollects. But the story that the narrator tells reveals that his father was alone among the miners in opposing the strike, and that he paid a heavy price for his opposition.
From the outset, Ford finds divisions where Warchus finds only unity. Ford explains the story of the strike in details down to the shilling; Warchus avoids the politics and the practicalities, illustrating the background only with archival footage of Margaret Thatcher, who may as well be decked out in horns and a trident. For Ford, a local scandal of an improper romance between the narrator’s sister, Angharad (Maureen O’Hara), and the new preacher (Walter Pidgeon) puts a fundamental loyalty to the test: he takes very seriously the religious faith of the villagers, including that of Angharad and her family, and though Ford has little sympathy for the gossips and the moralists (he never did) he finds in the conflict a path toward a vision of religious devotion that is higher than the narrowly moralist one. In short, where Warchus jollies the audience along to a foregone happy ending, Ford builds conflict, division, and loss into his view of solidarity and progress.
There’s one character in “Pride” whose conflicts offer potential cinematic interest: Maureen Barry (played by Lisa Palfrey), a widow and mother of two sons, who is the strike committee’s most vociferous and vicious opponent of the London gay delegation. To justify her hostility, she invokes the name of her late husband; it’s a moment that comes close to reverberating deeply. Her struggle bears a shuddering psychological power, a blend of anger and pain that Ford would have known how to unfold in its intimate and symbolic complexity.
But it’s as if Warchus were afraid to give a designated devil more than a drop of sympathy. “Pride” leaves viewers knowing exactly who’s who. Its heroes are immaculate, its villains are beyond redemption, and the audience can comfortably boo or cheer inwardly according to the setup of each situation. “Jimi: All Is by My Side,” another British historical movie that, like “Pride,” opened here last Friday, faces the same problem, and its director, John Ridley, errs in the opposite direction. Ridley, who centers the film on a brief span of Jimi Hendrix’s career—the years of 1966 and ’67, when Hendrix, not yet famous, went to London to make his name—picks up on disputed incidents to portray Hendrix in a sharply negative light.
Ridley is a much more sophisticated director than Warchus is; he lends throwaway moments a distinctive visual lilt, giving even the most accursed sort of sequences—long dialogue scenes—a memorable individuality. He’s after the magic of genius, and the performance that he gets from André Benjamin in the lead role captures it. Benjamin’s Hendrix appears possessed of a great secret that seems to tickle his lips into a distracted near-smile. His distractedness seems more engaged, his musing absence more present, than even the worldliest in his worldly entourage. But with the movie’s ugliest scenes—which depict Hendrix beating his girlfriend, Kathy Etchingham (Hayley Atwell), events that the real-life Etchingham claims never happened—Ridley also seems to be pushing viewers to the fault lines of a doctrinal divide.
Until recently, domestic violence was all too often accepted—unpunished by law, unchallenged in public discourse—as an unfortunate commonplace of romantic life. Fortunately, that’s changing; meanwhile, the very notion of the private realm is changing, too. As late as the nineteen-sixties (and, for that matter, I think, even into the eighties), public figures could count on the uglier details of their private lives going unreported or unscrutinized. Journalists (mainly men, of course) bear responsibility for that conspiracy of silence that served as a free pass for abuses and misdeeds of many sorts, including domestic violence. Now that private conduct is rightly understood to bear crucially on fitness for public life, it isn’t only politicians who come under intense scrutiny. Artists, too, are subjected to a spotlight—or, rather, to a sort of X-ray—that puts their claim upon attention, the celebration of their personality, to a severe test.
In his contentious depiction of Hendrix, Ridley is pushing a button. His Hendrix is a great artist who is also, in at least one fundamental and very important way, a bad person (all the more so in that the movie offers no reasons or causes for Hendrix’s brutality). The director, in effect, challenges viewers to reconcile their admiration for the artist’s work with their revulsion at the artist’s behavior.
“Jimi: All Is by My Side” offers no resolution to the paradox; it also offers no explanations. As I watched the movie, I detached the depiction of Hendrix’s violence from the rest of the movie—not because I find it convenient to put aside my own discomfort at any such revelation, but because Ridley’s own direction invites that detachment. The weakest aspect of the movie isn’t the assertion of Hendrix’s violence but its seeming arbitrariness. Ridley’s emphasis on Hendrix’s profuse artistic subjectivity is also, ultimately, vague. The supposed connection between Hendrix’s demonic guitar wizardry and his diabolical treatment of Etchingham remains undeveloped, an implicit cliché of creative fury.
Whether the facts are accurate or not, it’s a dubious enterprise to turn the life, work, and name of Hendrix into an abstract moral conundrum. A prime virtue of biography is specificity of psychological insight. Ridley’s view of a genius at work onstage and off is seductive, even awe-inspiring. His best images convey a search rather than an assertion, mysteries rather than verities. But in his efforts to turn this portrait into a calculated political provocation, Ridley bumps up against the limits of his artistic vision.
