'Pride' gets a rousing reception at Toronto Fest

The October issue of Film Journal International wrapped on Friday night, delaying this editor's arrival at the 2014 Toronto Film Festival. But I plan to do a lot of catching up in the next six days.

And my Toronto 2014 experience began with what surely is one of the top contenders for this year's Audience Award, judging by the wildly enthusiastic reception Matthew Warchus' Pride received at the historic Elgin Theatre. This British production is a real crowd-pleaser, a fascinating true story that's perfect for

this new era of broad, largely uncontroversial acceptance of gays and lesbians. That wasn't so in 1984, the year in which this true story takes place. Margaret Thatcher is playing hardball against the striking National Union of Mineworkers, whose families are facing terrible hardships. Mark, a young gay activist in London, believes his community should take a stand against the miners' oppression and forms a new organization, Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners. (At first, that small group includes only one lesbian.) They decide to pinpoint their efforts by raising money for the miners in a small Welsh village, and that's where the culture clash begins—both predictable and occasionally surprising.

Stephen Beresford's script often paints in broad strokes ("Old people say the darnedest things!") and the homophobic villains of the piece are strictly one-dimensional, but it offers a large ensemble of characters—both gay and straight—who are very likeable indeed. Four British veterans are top-billed: Bill Nighy as a taciturn Welshman who proves unexpectedly sympathetic; Imelda Stanton as the feistiest and most supportive of the villagers; Paddy Considine as a Welsh villager who's never met a gay before but deeply appreciates their largesse; and Dominic West, cast against type, as the most flamboyant of the activists. But the film is also a showcase for many younger actors: among them, Ben Schnetzer as the crusading Mark; Andrew Scott as a gay Welshman who's been estranged from his mother for years; Jessica Gunning as a sensible and outspoken Welsh housewife and mother destined for greater things; and George MacKay as a student who hides his sexuality and his newfound activism from his parents.

Somewhat reminiscent of Kinky Boots in its portrait of working-class folk bonding with the LGBT community, Pride cheerfully reinforces the theme expressed onstage by Warchus that "prejudice can't survive proximity." But the director (currently represented on Broadway with the hit Matilda) mused that thanks to social media, "we're more disconnected now," noting that a campaign like the current Ice Bucket Challenge only requires an iPhone and no face-to-face contact.

Joining Warchus onstage were writer Beresford, producer David Livingstone, Nighy, West, Scott and several more actors, and three of the real-life participants in the drama, including West's character Jonathan, the second man in Britain to be diagnosed with HIV—quite a remarkable survivor. Sian, the young Welsh mother in the film, went on to a significant political career and vouched that the real-life events were "really like a romance—two communities with nothing in common who fell in love."

At the after-party, Dominic West (aka Jimmy McNulty to all fans of "The Wire") told this writer he's now seen the film three times and each time finds it very moving. (He warmly embraced his real-life counterpart on the Elgin stage.) Though it generated a few snarky tabloid headlines at the time, the story of the miners and the gays isn't particularly well-known in Britain, he said, though the events portrayed did influence the Labor Party's eventual embrace of gay rights. With the film due for release in the United States by CBS Films on Sept. 26, that story is now poised to reach far beyond Britain.