Brassed Off
Written and directed by Mark Herman
Opens August 14
Review by James Vassilopoulos
"When god created humanity he had too many bodies and not enough fuckin' brains, hearts and vocal chords. So he thought to himself, what will I do with all these bodies? So then he created the fuckin' Tory party."
This was just one of the comic, angry lines in Brassed Off. The word Tory can be replaced with Labor — or any party in power which destroys the lives of working-class people by closing mines, sacking thousands of people, destroying education and stopping them from blowing their flugelhorn.
Brassed Off is a brilliant film. It is sad, it's funny, it's clever and it's musical. More than this, it is political and uplifting.
The film takes you on an emotional roller-coaster: your eyes swell and water, your throat hardens and lips quiver. (The cinema may have to be mopped up afterwards.)
Two weeks ago, the Sydney solidarity rally to support the striking Hunter Valley coal miners was greeted triumphantly by the mine workers' pipe band. The music was uplifting — just for a moment it seemed workers could do anything. There was courage in the notes, determination in the vibrations. Workers could defeat evil capitalists and their governments.
This was what the Grimly colliery brass band could also do.
Brassed Off tells the story of the brass band from the fictional coal pit town of Grimly, Yorkshire, in 1992. The band enters a national competition and makes it all the way to Albert Hall.
The coal pit faces closure. It is deemed to be profitable but not profitable enough (sound familiar?). The stakes are high; the spectre of unemployment is haunting Grimly. Husbands may lose everything, including their wives and kids — not to mention their self-respect. And if the pit closes, the brass band stops blowing.
An industrial dispute erupts. A union ballot is cast. The choice is a vote for blackmail — to accept redundancies — or a vote to fight.
The bleak, dark humour is extremely funny. Phil (played by Stephen Tompkinson, the vicar in Ballykissangel) returns home to find his furniture repossessed, realises his father, Danny, is dying, and meanwhile his wife has upped and left him, taking the kids. He sits down in his completely empty house only to find the electricity has been cut off!
To earn a little cash, Phil is also a clown. But Mr Chuckles smashes kids' watches instead of making them disappear, has huge, red four-foot long clown boots (watch him try to run in them) and tells jokes (such as the one at the beginning of this review) that are suited to an older crowd.
Brassed Off is full of incidents of working-class solidarity and humanity, a welcome relief from the current mainstream obsession with individualism. When a miner's wife finds she can not afford all her groceries, the checkout operator, another coal miner's wife, lets her off by 60p and slips her a £10 note.
The backdrop is the 1984 — 52-week long — National Union of Mineworkers strike led by Arthur Scargill (also known as King Arthur) to save 70,000 jobs. Twenty thousand picketers were arrested. Eventually, the strike was defeated because the miners did not get support from other unions and the Trades Union Congress.
Writer/director Mark Herman supported the miners' strike. But he said that Brassed Off is not a Yorkshire story: "It is a universal story. The same thing is happening in steel towns across America. Redundancy is devastating wherever and whenever it happens."
The acting is very convincing. Pete Postlethwaite (In the Name of the Father) plays Danny, the passionate conductor of the band, dying of the "cough of death". Postlethwaite states: "I was a very keen supporter of the miners' strike and found it heartbreaking to realise that whole communities were being destroyed".
Ewan McGregor, who played Renton in Trainspotting, plays Phil, a young miner who is sharp on company tactics and ends up falling in love with Gloria (Tara Fitzgerald).
Go and see Brassed Off. And remember, the next time you blow your trumpet (or your brassed nose): the workers united will never be defeated!