Andrew Garfield enlightens us about a little-known episode in English history but this is one of the muddiest and bloodiest films I've ever seen: BRIAN VINER reviews The Uprising
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The Uprising (15, 128 mins)
Rating: Four our of five stars
The Uprising, about the 1381 Peasants' Revolt, is one of the muddiest films I've ever seen, so we can only hope that the irony of his surname occurred to writer-director Paul Greengrass.
Either way, he makes a fine job of depicting late 14th-century England as an altogether wretched place.
Then as now, a pandemic had recently wrought havoc, although the Black Death was even more devastating than Covid, killing half the population. Among them were the wife and young daughters of a gutsy farmer we know only as 'the Ploughman'.
Played by Andrew Garfield with a brow as unhappily furrowed as his soggy field, this Ploughman has absolutely no time for lunch.
Grief-stricken, muscular and extremely miffed with the crown's boorish tax collectors, he's a perfect recruit for rebel leader Wat Tyler (Cosmo Jarvis) and his priestly sidekick John Ball (Jamie Bell).
They and their followers are all loyal to the teenage King Richard II (Woody Norman) but resent his ever-more punitive taxes and the baleful influence of his council, to whom the neurotic Richard is in thrall.
The Uprising, about the 1381 Peasants' Revolt, is one of the muddiest films I've ever seen, so we can only hope that the irony of his surname occurred to writer-director Paul Greengrass
They duly march on London at the head of a peasant militia, to the horror of the young king, whose scheming mentor, Sir Robert Hales (Tom Hollander), announces that armies have been ordered back from France and Scotland 'to quell this turmoil'.
Yet the turmoil continues, at least until Richard surprisingly agrees to Tyler's demands for a more just society, and discreetly allows the mob to take out their pent-up fury on his councillors, some of whom are unceremoniously beheaded.
A new people's charter is swiftly drawn up and copies for every part of England are meticulously quilled by scribes working round the clock… a scene which, not for the first time in this film, had me irreverently thinking of Monty Python. They'd have needed only one scribe, perhaps called Xerox the Wise.
Even if the spirit of Python doesn't hover as you watch The Uprising, the spirit of a certain BBC reality show might.
As the action converges on the Tower of London and we must effectively distinguish between traitors and faithfuls, Claudia Winkleman, with her raven-black fringe, would fit right in.
Of course, anyone looking for a more profound contemporary context will find plenty of modern parallels involving civil unrest and the abuse of power.
Alternatively, we can all just sit back and enjoy The Uprising as a well told, nicely acted story (also featuring Jonny Lee Miller, Stephen Dillane, Thomasin McKenzie and Katherine Waterston) without stretching for any modern-day perspectives.
A possible caveat to that enjoyment is the sheer bloodiness of it all, and a 'one year later' epilogue that will satisfy some and land with a dull clunk for others, with Greengrass evidently deciding to turn his doughty Ploughman into Robin Hood.
On the whole, though, despite its rather whimsical fictional flourishes, his film enlightens us about a relatively little-known episode in English history much more successfully than, for example, Mike Leigh's 2018 misfire Peterloo.
KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.