Pride (2014)

image courtesy of behindthelensonline.net

I don't like when a film is too manipulative. It feels artificial, and instead of tapping into my emotional core, it turns me off - that's the moment I start noticing the machinery instead of feeling anything. I can sense the gears turning, the swell of the score cued exactly where the script needs me to break, and once I'm aware of the apparatus, I'm gone, watching from the outside instead of living it from the inside. There's a real skill to earning emotion versus extracting it, and so many "based on a true story" dramas lean on the latter, stacking up moments engineered to make you cry rather than letting the story breathe its way there. They mistake frequency for power, like if they just hit you enough times in the chest, something has to land. But when it's done well, when the characters are well drawn and the film has forward momentum rather than a series of set pieces specifically meant to draw out emotion, it can be an incredibly rewarding experience. And I don't know if it was my mindset going in or if this really is a perfectly constructed narrative, but this really knocked it out of the park. It moves. It has somewhere to be. The emotion arrives because the plot mechanics demand it, not because the film stops and asks for it. Nothing here feels like it's waiting for you to catch up emotionally - it just keeps going, and you keep up.

Every single movie should have Paddy Considine, Bill Nighy, and Imelda Staunton. All of them. For the rest of time. They are a gift that must be protected at all costs, and this is exactly the kind of film that shows why: an ensemble piece that needs actors who can make five minutes of screen time feel like a fully lived life. They're not decoration here, they're the connective tissue that makes a sprawling, multi-strand story feel lived-in and true rather than like a checklist of Important Themes. You believe these people had whole lives before the camera showed up and will have whole lives after it leaves, which is the hardest illusion for an ensemble film to pull off and the first thing that collapses when the actors aren't up to it.

That structure is part of why it works. The George McKay plotline could've been the thing that dominated the film - the shy kid finding his voice and his people is exactly the kind of single-protagonist arc a lesser version of this story would've centered everything on, and it's the easiest one to market a whole film around, the poster-ready emotional spine. But it wisely stays just one of multiple plotlines that feed into the larger themes of abandonment, found family, and finding support systems. Nobody's arc gets to swallow everyone else's, which is rare in films juggling this many characters. The discipline to let a perfectly good, perfectly sellable story stay one thread among several is exactly the kind of restraint that's missing from the movies I was complaining about above.

Jessica Gunning is fantastic, and she's a good example of how the film keeps its quieter performers from getting lost in such a crowded cast - she doesn't need a big speech or a spotlit moment to register, she just sits there fully formed. Very different than Baby Reindeer, for sure.

Yes, you have to have a wooden, one-dimensional villain to point all your arrows at, which is typically lazy. But the way Lisa Palfrey is deployed works well enough to not drag down what is a really functional story about growth and change. She's there to apply pressure, not to be interesting, and the film is smart enough not to waste time pretending otherwise - it doesn't try to dress her up with a sympathetic backstory or a redemptive beat, because that's not the job it needs her to do.

And Dominic West and Andrew Scott. What a power couple. There's not much left to say. It's sweet, it's endearing, and it's nice to see an activism film where none of the characters die during the film's runtime - where the stakes are real without the film needing to cash them in for tragedy to prove it meant something.