Mark Herman’s brass-band comedy-drama is moving, funny and worth an evening, despite some awkward changes of tone. Pete Postlethwaite makes the threatened mining community’s attachment to its music believable, even when the plotting turns dutiful.
Brassed Off is a good comedy-drama with a stubborn streak of anger, and its brass band gives that anger somewhere useful to go. Writer-director Mark Herman takes a northern mining community threatened by pit closures and asks what happens to the things people do together when their work is taken away. There are jokes, a romance and a competition to keep the story moving. Some of that plotting is too familiar, but the people hold our attention.
Pete Postlethwaite’s Danny leads the band with a faith in its importance that can look unreasonable beside the threat to the players’ livelihoods. Postlethwaite lets that stubbornness be difficult, which saves Danny from becoming merely a lovable enthusiast. We were moved by his insistence that the music still deserves their attention when there is so much else to fear. The performance makes clear why keeping the band together matters to him, without requiring us to agree with his priorities at every moment.
Herman’s humour works because these people have more to occupy them than representing a social problem. Stephen Tompkinson and Jim Carter help make the band feel like a group whose members have lives beyond the music; the ensemble’s company is a substantial part of the pleasure. Ewan McGregor’s Andy Barrow and Tara Fitzgerald’s Gloria fit comfortably into that company, though the romantic plot is less distinctive. Its familiar demands take up time that might have been spent with the wider cast.
Andy Collins’s cinematography gives the band scenes a useful sense of people accustomed to sharing space. Don Taylor’s production design is convincing for much the same reason: the surroundings never seem more important than the musicians. Trevor Jones’s score is less memorable than the brass playing, which supplies the strongest feeling. Hearing the ensemble work together makes the attachment to the band comprehensible without another explanation from Danny.
Michael Ellis’s editing has the harder task of managing Herman’s changes from northern comedy to hardship. Some transitions feel abrupt enough to suggest that a lighter film has been interrupted, and the jokes do not always survive the pressure placed on them. Herman’s screenplay can also become insistent about a political position it has already made clear. We do not need convincing that the threatened workers deserve our sympathy, and the extra persuasion makes their difficulties feel briefly forced.
Herman is working within a familiar sort of community comedy, built around people finding pride in a shared pursuit. People facing unemployment still tell jokes, and he is right to let his characters be funny without apologising for them. The trouble comes when the love story and the contest require predictable pleasures while the threat to the town remains so large. Those demands occasionally make the film push for a response that the actors were already earning.
These are reservations about a film we would still happily spend an evening with. Across its 107 minutes, the musicians have enough humour and obstinacy to be worth knowing, even when Herman overstates their case. Choose it for Postlethwaite and the playing, and be prepared to forgive a script that occasionally tells us how to feel.
