Around the end of the 1990s, three popular movies about the ravages of Thatcherism on working-class communities all featured characters finding solace in culture. In Billy Elliot, it was an escape through dance. In The Full Monty, it was nightclub stripping. And in Brassed Off, it was the power of music.
Of the three, Brassed Off has the gentlest emotional arc. Its heart is in the right place, though it has none of the gender subversiveness of Billy Elliot and not quite as much bleak despair as The Full Monty. It finds a metaphor for industrial decline in the story of a colliery brass band whose fate is tied to the survival of the pit. Ten years after the miners’ strike, the band is an expression of a community under threat.
