A refreshing change from banal and repulsive cinema

The Full Monty
Directed by Peter Cattaneo
Produced by Uberto Pasolini
Written by Simon Beaufoy

By Robert Stevens

Cinema today is dominated by and large by superficial films, which never seek to challenge or question any of the many ills of society. Despite the growth of social misery and inequality on an unprecedented scale, they don't make any pretence to examine, let alone, criticise the existing order. Rather, they slavishly glorify and promote its institutions.

Last year's most popular and biggest money-making film was the banal and repulsive Independence Day in which the US President single-handedly defeats an alien invasion. The number one film at the US box office at the time of writing is Air Force One, another film in which the hero is -- the US President, this time saving the Presidential aeroplane in mid-flight!

It is rare then, for a film to portray the lives and emotions of characters who actually reflect the social predicament facing millions of people. This reality of unemployment, poverty, low-paid jobs, strained personal relationships and the day to day struggle to make a living are portrayed in The Full Monty, a very funny comedy about six unemployed workers from Sheffield.

The film was the number one at the box office in Britain for the five weeks after its release. Even more surprisingly the film has also reached number three at the US box office without even going on general release. It is only being shown at 387 screens out of a possible 10,000. When measured against the actual number of people going to see the film at these cinemas, The Full Monty has by far the highest per screen viewing figures of any film in the US this year. Many people have returned to see it two or three times.

Behind the success

What accounts for the success of The Full Monty? The film is a comedy, but its humour is derived from situations that many of its audience could find themselves in. People have identified with the film and have embraced it as a refreshing alternative to the usual mind-numbing mono-diet of big budget blockbusters.

The director Peter Cattaneo said, "The comedy was complemented by a serious tone because it was about real people. In addition to being funny, it was a story with a contemporary relevance about what long-term unemployment does to people."

Many workers can identify with the plight of these unemployed steel workers. In the words of Robert Carlyle, one of the actors in the film, "It's a very universal and human story -- the struggle to earn a buck."

Making a direct comparison of Sheffield with the social conditions in many cities in the US, The Boston Globe, said, "Sheffield, its sheen as a steel-making centre tarnished by shuttered factories, appears as coldly desolate as any Rust Belt foundry town in the American Midwest. It could be Pittsburgh or any other major manufacturing town down on its luck but whose residents have an indefatigable resilience."

Then and now

The Full Monty opens with an old promotional film about Sheffield, made in the early 1970s, hailing it as "City on the Move" and the "Jewel in Yorkshire's crown". The promo boasts of the 90,000 workers employed in the thriving steel industry. It cites the lively nightlife that Sheffield's residents enjoyed, "thanks to steel".

The film then goes forward 25 years and presents the bleak picture Sheffield in 1997, with its derelict and abandoned steel mills.

Gaz, played by the impressive Carlyle, and his friend Dave (Mark Addy) are ex-steelworkers who have been made redundant. Gaz, who is divorced from his wife, is desperate to earn some money because he owes £700 in maintenance payments and has been told that if he fails to pay up, he will not be able to see his son Nathan again. This predicament, so familiar to many, is sensitively played by Carlyle.

Gaz sees a queue of women waiting to see a performance by the famous male strippers, The Chippendales. He hits on the idea of raising money by stripping and going further than "your average ten bit stripper", by going the "full monty"-- taking all their clothes off.

After persuading Dave, who is overweight and suffering from impotency, to join him, Gaz assembles a troupe including his ex-foreman, Gerald, who has also been made redundant. He is so distraught at losing his job that he has been unable to tell his wife about it, even after six months. Gaz informs him, "You're just like the rest of us now -- scrap".

Absurdities of life

Most of the film deals with the tribulations of the troupe as they get into shape and prepare for their big night. Many of these scenes are genuinely humorous. They are arrested for indecent exposure by a bemused policeman as they are practising their choreography in a disused steel mill. Two escape by running through back gardens half naked in lurid red leather thongs. Another shows them gyrating their hips while queuing for their dole, when they hear Donna Summer's "Hot Stuff" on the radio.

Speaking about this aspect of the comedy, the producer, Pasolini, said, "It is also a story that keeps the absurdities of life very much on the surface and is about finding new energy, camaraderie and friendship. In a sense it is a story about regeneration."

The writer of the screenplay, Simon Beaufoy, was born and brought up in Yorkshire and developed the idea for the script following the closure of the steel mills in the late 1980s. He comments: "With women increasingly becoming the breadwinners and traditional roles being reversed by their new-found economic independence, men were forced to re-examine their relationships and deeply beliefs about gender roles. Fifteen years ago male strippers were unheard of in England. There have been huge changes in the past several decades in how men and women view each other and in The Full Monty we used the idea of stripping as a starting point to examine those changes. It is about the need not to lose hope, and the humour and optimism that is present even in life's most difficult moments".

In reality what has taken place is not a reversal of gender roles as Beaufoy claims. What is seen by the men in the film as their "emasculation" is the result of the massive destruction of jobs and living standards in the last 20 years. This has had is most severe impact on heavy industry where male workers were the main family "breadwinner". This has not meant that women have replaced men in this role. Despite the growth in female employment, their pay is still significantly worse than that of men. Rather the destruction of large numbers of often skilled and semi-skilled male jobs has forced many men into the low-paid, part-time labour once predominantly occupied by women or into unemployment.

With one or two exceptions, the film deals with relations between men and women with sensitivity. It also cleverly adopts the image of the security guard to emphasise the terrible social plight of many workers. Many ex-steel workers and miners have become security guards, working for as little as £2 an hour. Reviled as an occupation, it has become something of a growth industry.

One of the characters, Lomper, was once a steelworker who used to work with Gaz and Dave. He still works in the same mill, only now as a security guard "protecting" an empty building from those it once employed. He is so disillusioned that he attempts suicide and is saved by his old friends. The Full Monty examines how these characters are then able to relate to each other based on their common experiences.

Comedy in the cinema

The attraction of the characters to large numbers of people is that they have succeeded in some way in escaping the humdrum existence of life on the dole, even if for only one night. Seen in this context, the film is a "feel-good movie". The scriptwriter's message "about the need not to lose hope" is really all he has to say at this point.

The Full Monty uses an artificial conceit, albeit a humorous one, of unemployed workers who turn to stripping as its vehicle for expressing the strength and determination of workers in the face of adversity. This is not in essence the fault of the writer or the director. The movie, within limits, goes against the grain of mainstream cinema. But it is also a product of the present political and social climate -- in which the working class has suffered numerous defeats at the hands of its old leaderships and the belief in a progressive socialist alternative has been undermined.

Both The Full Monty and Brassed Off, last years' film about the effects of the destruction of the mining industry, have tackled serious issues in a humorous way. There would be those who would object to comedy being employed for this purpose because of its tendency to trivialise. This is not a legitimate criticism.

Undoubtedly films with a more penetrating and serious approach are needed in order to develop a fuller understanding of the events portrayed in The Full Monty. Artistic works with a comic theme, however, can also contribute to this process of understanding. This is an important point that Leon Trotsky, the co-leader of the Russian Revolution, elaborated on.

Commenting on the necessity to lift the cultural level of the Soviet people in 1923 in his article, "Vodka, the Church and the Cinema", he explained that:

"The longing for amusement, distraction, sight-seeing, and laughter is the most legitimate desire of human nature. We are able, and indeed obliged, to give the satisfaction of this desire a higher artistic quality, at the same time making amusement a weapon of collective education, freed from the guardianship of the pedagogue and the tiresome habit of moralising".

Trotsky considered that the cinema had a very important role to play in this "collective education":

"The passion for the cinema is rooted in the desire for distraction, the desire to see something new and improbable, to laugh and to cry, not at your own, but at other people's misfortunes." (Problems of Everyday Life, p32, Pathfinder Press, New York, 1973).

The reception that has greeted these films is a sign of the times. It indicates that there is a broad and growing audience for cinema that doesn't just rely on high body counts, special effects or super heroes.

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