Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Paul Greengrass
Starring: Andrew Garfield, Katherine Waterston, Jamie Bell, Stephen Dillane, Tom Hollander, Cosmo Jarvis, Thomasin McKenzie, Jonny Lee Miller, Woody Norman
Away from the Jason Bourne series, director Paul Greengrass is most associated with movies based on real events from the recent past: the self-explanatory Bloody Sunday, Omagh, United 93, Captain Phillips; the 2011 Norway massacre drama 22 July; and most recently the real life disaster flick The Lost Bus. The Uprising sees Greengrass tackle far less recent history with a kinetic yet surprisingly stodgy tale of revolting peasants in 14th century England.
The year is 1381 and half of England's population has been wiped out by the Black Death. As such, the crown is desperate for taxes. Unwilling to meet the demands of the London Merchants to have a say in the nation's affairs in exchange for higher taxes, the council of the young King Richard II (Woody Norman) raises taxes for the country's peasant class.
Our hero, who goes by the name of Ploughman (Andrew Garfield), is a farmer who recently lost his wife and children to the plague. He becomes a cult figure after standing up to the king's forces who come to collect taxes from his village. As word of Ploughman's defiance spreads across the land, a nationwide resistance forms. Teaming up with ex-soldier Wat Tyler (Cosmo Jarvis) and rebel priest John Ball (Jamie Bell), Ploughman leads a march towards London to demand an audience with the King and get some much needed tax cuts.
Much of The Uprising is reminiscent of the 1940 film The Proud Valley, in which Paul Robeson plays an American immigrant miner who becomes a hero to the residents of a small Welsh village, leading a march to London in search of justice. Robeson's performance is so strong that you can easily believe an entire village falling in line behind him. Not so much Garfield, who is so uninspiring with his one-note performance that you simply can't buy him as a leader of men and women.
The distanced, documentarian approach that Greengrass applies to most of his based-on-true-events dramas proves disastrous here. Movies set this far in the past require a printing of the legend to draw us in. Ploughman is ostensibly the central figure here, but he's a protagonist only in the loosest sense of the word. He has more screen time than any other character, but makes practically no impact. The Uprising's American marketing was widely mocked for adding the subtitle "The Rise of Robin Hood." The movie has nothing to do with that legendary folk hero, but you can see why the PR team were desperate to create the illusion of a heroic figure for the public to latch onto here. Historical epics demand a strong central hero. What would Braveheart be without William Wallace? Spartacus without Spartacus? Ben-Hur without Ben-Hur? The Uprising makes you realise just why it's so often necessary to condense several historical figures into one standout protagonist. Rather than complementing each other, Ploughman, Tyler and Ball (now there's a name for a folk rock trio) get in each other's way, and the drama would no doubt be more involving if all three characters were subsumed into one central figure.
More interesting than Ploughman and his lot are the sneering villains of King Richard's council, played as they are by a host of ever watchable character actors like Stephen Dillane, Tom Hollander and Stanley Townsend. They seem to be in a far more entertaining movie than the one featuring Garfield and co. The American import Katherine Waterston is surprisingly convincing as the King's mother, Joan of Kent, though her implied attraction to Ploughman is rendered laughable by Garfield's lack of charisma.
The scenes of clashes between peasants and the King's forces are brutal and bloody, with heads being lopped off left, right and centre. But Greengrass's customary shaky cam and quick editing renders much of the action incomprehensible. Greengrass doesn't seem to have gotten the message that audiences grew tired of such filmmaking almost two decades ago.
The Uprising could have been a unifying epic for our times. The Right would identify with the idea of rising against an authoritarian and tax-loving regime while The Left would embrace the working class striking against the wealthy establishment. But Greengrass has rendered a story that should be emotionally and politically charged as an oddly unengaging slog through the mud, one crying out for Errol Flynn to swing into the action on a chandelier.
The Uprising is in UK/ROI cinemas from October 9th.
