'Brassed Off': Wind Instrument

When Noel Coward famously observed, "Extraordinary how potent cheap music is," he might have been reviewing "Brassed Off": It's musical, potent and cheap.

An odd duck of a movie, it's really a British Labor Party television commercial bitterly shoehorned into the cheesy format of an American triumph fantasy, with a horn section.

The setting is Margaret Thatcher's working-class England in 1992, during the country's program of mine closings. Actually, as the film represents it, that should read "during the pogrom of pit closings." This policy -- closing down the mining industry, replacing the mines with nuclear reactors, buying off and retraining the miners -- is represented with the self-righteous fury usually reserved for films on the Holocaust, although even writer-director Mark Herman's own script admits that typically the miners voted in favor 4 to 1.

Really, the chord of anger that radiates so furiously from the center of the picture is not nearly so effective as Herman thinks: It has quite the opposite effect. Occasionally, watching it is like being hectored by a blowhard who won't stop spraying mucus droplets on your face.

Too bad. The film boasts some sublime comic moments and a whole slew of brilliant performances. At its best, "Brassed Off" resembles nothing so much as those terrific old '50s British comedies, chronicles of eccentricity, slapstick, large breasts and cross-dressing, with Peter Sellers, Terry-Thomas and that whole dotty lot.

In the dying burg of Grimley in the north of England, the decision is about to be made as to the future of the Grimley Colliery (Britspeak for "mine"). This occupies everyone save one chap: Danny (Pete Postlethwaite), the band leader. The band leader? Now why would a grim scab of civilization built atop a coal vein have a band? It's just another reason why there'll always be an England.

In their lavender Eton jackets, with their brass instruments gleaming, the Grimley Colliery Band has been oom-pah-pahing for generations, grinding out bad music and drinking heroic quantities of good beer, and Danny, a retired miner, is the inheritor of the baton, determined to keep the tunes coming. He fits into a long line of stubborn British eccentrics, ranging from the fabulous Gulley Jimson of "The Horse's Mouth" to the disastrous Col. Nicholson of "Bridge on the River Kwai" (both played by Alec Guinness, come to think of it).

Danny is as heroically crazed as the one and as crazily heroic as the other: No other possibility exists for him except the future of the band. Even the cough that's begun to gnaw at his lungs, and the anthracite-black sputum that he hawks up, can't deflect him from the purity of this belief.

Meanwhile, everyone else, concerned over small nonmusical matters like, oh, you know, the future, is thinking of hanging it up. Not that Danny notices. Then deliverance arrives, in the form of a rare beauty named Gloria (Tara Fitzgerald), an angel with a fluegelhorn.

Gloria's radiance reinvigorates the band -- especially young stud Andy (Ewan McGregor of "Trainspotting") and Danny's own son, the embittered, hassled Phil (Stephen Tompkinson in the movie's best performance). Can it be that the newly revitalized band has a shot at "the finals" in Prince Albert Hall, even at the championship trophy?

You know certain things right off the top. Once Danny coughs, an edge-of-death scene is in the cards. When son Phil starts working up extra money in a clown suit, you know a clown suicide attempt is a sure thing. It doesn't take a genius to predict that, with her clean fingernails and paid-up car, Gloria may work for hated management. You hear the word "championships," and you just know that, somehow, our plucky lads will be there when the trophy is handed out.

What you don't know is that now and then the movie will absolutely stop dead, and Phil or Andy or even Gloria will issue an earnest to-hell-with-Mrs.-Thatcher address with more passion than sense and more sense than interest. At least the movie's agenda isn't hidden, even if it does keep hitting you in the snout.

Brassed Off is rated R for profanity and sexual situations.