Mark Herman is at his strongest when music brings a hard-pressed community together. We like his warmth and humour, though his plots sometimes insist on sympathy that the actors have already earned.
Fi1m perspective
The band members in Brassed Off (1996) have jokes to make even as their livelihoods come under threat. Mark Herman lets them get on with it, giving Stephen Tompkinson and Jim Carter room to suggest lives beyond the music. We enjoy their company because being worried about work has not made them uniformly solemn. His feel for a group is the chief reason to watch his films, although the stories he builds around them can be less convincing.
His first feature, Blame It on the Bellboy (1992), was a mistaken-identity comedy. The breakthrough came with Brassed Off, which he both wrote and directed, and its threatened mining community gave his humour something substantial to address. He followed it with Little Voice (1998), adapting Jim Cartwright's play and putting Jane Horrocks's vocal impressions alongside Michael Caine and Brenda Blethyn. The combination of music and an ensemble was becoming a recognisable part of his work.
Brassed Off remains our clearest recommendation. We were moved by the band's stubborn attachment to music, which Pete Postlethwaite makes believable while the town faces losing its work. Herman understands that shared pursuits matter to people, and he allows the jokes to matter too. The band competition gives the story a practical goal, though its familiar course is less interesting than the people taking part.
The difficulty is getting from those jokes to the hardship without making either feel imposed. Editor Michael Ellis has to manage some abrupt changes of tone, and there are passages where a lighter comedy seems to have been interrupted. Ewan McGregor and Tara Fitzgerald fit the ensemble comfortably, but their romance takes time from the wider cast without offering much that is distinctive. Herman sometimes pushes for a response when leaving the actors alone would have been enough.
Adaptations continued with Purely Belter (2000) and Hope Springs (2003), before The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2008) took him towards markedly different material. Based on John Boyne's novel, it approaches the Holocaust through a German child's perspective. Critics were divided over its fable-like treatment and historical simplifications, a serious caveat for a director whose storytelling can already press too hard. Start with Brassed Off, and give the love story a little patience.
Biography
Mark Herman is a British film director and screenwriter. He was born in 1954 in Bridlington, East Riding of Yorkshire, England, and studied at Leeds Polytechnic and the National Film and Television School in London.
Herman wrote and directed Brassed Off (1996), which follows a colliery brass band. His other feature films include Blame It on the Bellboy (1992), Little Voice (1998), Purely Belter (2000), Hope Springs (2003) and The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2008). Brassed Off received the Peter Sellers Award for Comedy at the Evening Standard British Film Awards and the Best Screenplay award from the Writers' Guild of Great Britain.
