7MMO
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Writer-director Paul Greengrass’ The Uprising is a visceral and kinetic but uneven chronicle of the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt in England, anchored by the ever-reliable Andrew Garfield’s moving performance as a mournful farmer who helps spark a rebellion that seeks to improve the lives of the common folk. As he has done in Bloody Sunday and United 93, Greengrass focuses on everyday people who get caught up in tragic historic events. The Uprising, though, can’t quite find the balance between the "big picture" events it’s depicting and those smaller-scale, more focused docudramas.
Called simply Ploughman, Garfield’s protagonist feverishly works the land every day just to eke out the barest living. His small farm, which belongs to a local lord, is also the resting place of his late wife and two children. He basically has nothing left, a crushing state shared by many of his neighbors. Set at a time when the people are gripped by immense grief – England had lost roughly half its population to the Black Death – their pain fuels not only their fury at the powers-that-be but also their hope that God can miraculously deliver them from their misery.
With problems at home and wars abroad, the government is in need of more funds – the lords are unwilling to let the merchant class enter their ranks and the Church won’t spend anymore – so they enact a heavy new tax that guts the commoners. Collection methods are so brutal and dehumanizing that, sparked by Ploughman’s violent outburst, the peasants finally snap. Ploughman and his neighbors soon join a peasant army led by Cosmo Jarvis’ brawny ex-soldier Wat Tyler and Jamie Bell’s fiery renegade priest John Ball. (Both Tyler and Ball are real figures while the Ploughman is fictional.)
They march towards London not to overthrow King Richard II – their quarrel is more with his council of cads who are really in charge – but to petition him for sweeping reforms. (The King, one must remember, was thought to be divinely chosen, so fealty to him is also showing devotion to God.) But the rage that such long-term oppression has fostered in the peasants – exemplified by Thomasin McKenzie’s fervent Alyce, who seeks to inflict her suffering on her perceived enemies – ultimately explodes into sheer anarchy.
By showing such a savage mob mentality take hold, Greengrass challenges the justness of the peasants’ actions, which muddies one’s feelings about the titular uprising. History is never clean and Greengrass wants to show that, but the film makes you doubt your sympathy for its underdogs once the bloodletting erupts into utter chaos on the streets of London.
Shot in the cinéma vérité style that’s become a Greengrass hallmark, the filmmaker immerses the viewer in the grimy, relentlessly miserable life of medieval serfdom, achieving the you-are-there effect so well that you’re thankful Smell-O-Vision doesn’t exist. Yet Greengrass repeatedly pulls the viewer out of this historical realism by cutting to jarring digital aerial shots swooping over London – attempts to demonstrate the scale of the revolt – images that seem, at best, filmed by a Ye Olde Drone or, worse, AI-generated.
The cast is uniformly solid, with the film’s rogues gallery brought to life by a murderer’s row of British character actors – Tom Hollander as Treasurer Robert Hales, Stephen Dillane as Archbishop Simon Sudbury, Stanley Townsend as Chief Justice Belknap, and an unrecognizable Jonny Lee Miller as London’s Mayor William Walworth – all of whom play their characters with varying degrees of haughty cruelty.
But these men are in the service of teenage King Richard II, portrayed with nuance and complexity by Woody Norman. Richard, who may have a personality disorder of some kind, is bedeviled by nightmares and utterly petrified with piety — before he finally takes charge of his fate with a brutal efficiency that stuns even his own mother, Joan, Countess of Kent (an understated Katherine Waterston). The Uprising initially generates some sympathy for the King until, of course, the little shit pisses away any such good will.
The Uprising also depicts the bureaucracy that keeps the engine of oppression operating, particularly the paperwork that can either expose the rebels’ identities or serve as their literal ticket to a better life. I’ve never seen a suspense set-piece before where a roomful of scribes with quill pens must furiously copy dozens of charters in order to meet a crucial deadline. Write fast! No, faster!
There’s plenty of tension in the final act – which also takes significant creative liberties with the events that transpired at Smithfield on June 15, 1381 – but that’s also where Greengrass’ breathlessly-paced film loses its footing, straining to turn history on its head with a Braveheart-worthy happy ending. The final scenes, which would be at home in a Mel Gibson or Robin Hood movie -- it wasn't known to be a Rise of Robin Hood movie at the time I screened the film and Garfield's character is never referred to as such -- end The Uprising on an awkward note rather than the crowd-pleasing one that seemed intended.
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