Bourne director Paul Greengrass enlists Andrew Garfield to star in The Uprising, a bombastic retelling of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381.
Written by Greengrass himself, the film brings us right into the mud alongside Garfield’s hero – an embittered farmer who goes by the name of Ploughman – as he pushes back against King Richard II’s new taxation laws. The crown is practically bankrupt, so everyone must pay the price of padding Richard’s royal pockets, but his taxmen exact too high a price – one that no peasant could rightly pay.
‘Enough! Enough! We’ve given you enough!’
Ploughman, having lost his wife and both his children in the recent Plague, is pushed over the edge when he sees the king’s men try to assault the young women of the village as some sick form of payment.
He declares that the townsfolk have given more than enough, roaring in the face of so-called authority, and beats a guard bloody in the process, sparking a rebellion that winds up marching all the way to London to demand justice from the King himself, the mob growing in number as it moves headlong across the country.
Garfield is one of the best actors of his generation. I had the chance to rewatch The Social Network ahead of its spiritual sequel this week and was reminded of that fact all over again. He’s incredibly emotive and can usually take whatever he’s been given and run with it at full pelt to deliver the goods, but even he struggles to muster something worthwhile out of Greengrass’ script here.
There are frustratingly brief moments where we get an inkling of Ploughman’s inner torment – the image of him mourning at the three graves of his family in the rural mist tells us a lot in the opening scene alone – but he spends the vast majority of this movie relegated to little more than a background extra. He’s one somber face among a crowd of thousands.
Rather than lend Ploughman’s crucial contribution to the movement any weight, his initial snap is wheeled out before we’ve even had a minute to settle into our seats. He’s to be commended on his snap-to-it efficiency but that swiftness doesn’t lend itself to building up a sense of history or of feeling worn down by the iron fist of the law. It’s less the straw that broke the camel’s back; more the straw that approached the camel, who then went on to throw down the gauntlet and usurp the straw.
Mixed metaphors aside, the film’s fast pace is undeniably detrimental in terms of giving us something to actually resonate with. I could easily see Greengrass spending time behind the scenes trying to ensure that that sense of momentum, of a movable feast gaining power and speed and followers as it enveloped England, rang true on-screen.
I certainly felt swept up in their crusade, singing along with the common people, but while that has its charms (there’s spectacle in the sheer amount of people on-screen, though Greengrass obviously likes to bulk up his crowds with CGI), it’s hard to care about any of it when the film hasn’t taken the time to properly establish its characters and their motivations.
The strict pace gets to the action fast, but it’s built on shaky foundations, if it has any at all.
Thomasin McKenzie has what ought to be a meaningful role as Alice, a relative stranger who becomes one of Ploughman’s nearest and dearest over the course of the journey, but she gets nothing to do. That’s a real shame in and of itself; I think she’s brilliant – Last Night in Soho is a film I cherish – and yet McKenzie still seems to crop up on our screens so little. Alice has her own reasons for joining the fight – as I’m sure everyone else in the crowd does, as well – but the film is much more concerned with the group as a whole, as one solid entity, than it is interested in deepening our understanding of these people.
That strange pacing leads to an odd feeling of progression over the course of the film’s two hours, which at least go by quickly. The filmmakers have pointed to similarities between the medieval Revolt and modern sparks of public disorder and outrage in the UK, and there are some intriguing gestures towards ideas of herd mentality and a crowd of so many people losing control of themselves and their initial purpose in favour of sheer mob mentality. These moments feel like afterthoughts, though.
Greengrass has staffed King Richard’s council of advisors with a surprisingly strong handful of pop culture legends, from Pirates villain Tom Hollander to Stephen Dillane, who played Stannis Baratheon in Game of Thrones. There’s even Katherine Waterston, who gets to do her very best impression of Queen Amidala from The Phantom Menace, pale-faced and dressed to the nines at all times as Joan of Kent, the King’s mother.
As with most of the talent here, this lot are just asked to look concerned and frown as scouts rush in and report on the mob’s latest gains and advances, but Greengrass’ shaky-cam leaves these scenes feeling like excerpts from The Thick of It, to the point where I almost expected Peter Capaldi to turn up dressed in his Three Musketeers regalia and clap the King’s ears for being an omnishambles.
After stumbling to its finish line, the film treats us to a lovely ‘One Year Later’ epilogue, which might be the worst three words that could possibly appear on screen when you’d rather the story just cut its losses and faded to black already.
The Uprising’s marketing originally featured a subtitle that stood to recontextualise the entire story in a big way, but the film hitting cinemas as just The Uprising, alongside next to nothing in the film proper foreshadowing this final note, leaves this epilogue feeling like one of the oddest endings of the year. That just goes to cap off a picture that never once seems to find its own identity beyond mud, swords and shouting.
BBFC: Rated 15 for strong violence, injury detail, sexual assault.
The Uprising is in cinemas now.
