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Mike Leigh's passionate but dry, overlong film brings the Peterloo massacre to life |
Director: Mike Leigh
Cast: Rory Kinnear (Henry Hunt), Maxine Peake (Nellie),
Pearce Quigley (Joshua), David Moorst (Joseph), Rachel Finnegan (Mary), Tom
Meredith (Robert), Simona Bitmate (Esther), Karl Johnson (Lord Sidmouth), Sam
Troughton (Mr Hobhouse), Roger Sloman (Mr Grout), Alastair Mackenzie (General
Byng), Neil Bell (Samuel Bamford), Lisa Millet (Jemima Bamford), Philip Jackson
(John Knight), John-Paul Hurley (John Thacker Saxton), Tom Gill (Joseph
Johnson), Lizzie Frain (Mrs Johnson), Ian Mercer (Dr Joseph Healey), Nico
Mirallegro (John Bagguley), Danny Kirrane (Samuel Drummond), Johnny Byron (John
Johnston), Tim McInnerny (Prince Regent), Vincent Franklin (Reverend
Etlhelstone), Jeff Rawle (Hay), Philip Whitchurch (Colonel Fletcher), Martin
Savage (Norris), Al Weaver (Hutton)
Perhaps one of the most pivotal moments in the struggle of
the working classes to gain political and social rights was the Peterloo massacre
of 16th August 1819, at St Peter’s Field in Manchester. At a meeting
of over 60,000 people, officials ordered first the mounted yeomanry and then
soldiers to attack and break up the crowd. At least 15 people were killed and
hundreds more wounded, either from the indiscriminate sabre blows from the
yeomen (probably drunk) and soldiers (unable to control the panic), or crushed
in the frantic attempt to escape from the confined square. The immediate
reaction from the authorities was praise at breaking up this “Bonapartist”
piece of revolutionary nonsense. The lasting effect was condemnation of the
brutality shown towards a peaceful demonstration and the massacre becoming a
major cause celebre. It was ultimately influential in the passing of the Great
Reform Act, which greatly extended the franchise and rebalanced much of Parliament
(at this point so unbalanced by age old tradition that while some tiny hamlets
returned MPs, the whole of Manchester had no representation).
It’s still an emotive subject for many today, and with this
reverent film, overflowing with anger at the hypocrisy and injustice of the
ruling classes, you can’t doubt that Mike Leigh and the makers of Peterloo are among them. But however
sincere their personal passion about the subject is, what they fail to bring to
the film is any real dramatic impetus to make us care. Instead this is an inert, over-long, often (if I am being
completely honest) tedious film that takes nearly an hour to get going and then
only offers flashes of dramatic interest before culminating in the massacre
itself (very well shot and staged, but still itself a rather distant viewing
experience).
A large reason for
this is the film is so reverential towards the campaigners for liberty, that
the overwhelming majority of their scenes are given over to very good actors
giving spirited renditions of actual speeches and pamphlets at a series of
political meetings, shot with a reverent simplicity by Leigh. Much as it is can
be interesting to hear quotes from things like this, by the time we are onto
our twelfth political speech covering similar ground, delivered with another
bout of fiery passion, you’ve started to glaze over. What we don’t get from
many of these campaigners is any reason to really care about them – either as people or as part of a movement.
Instead the film ends up like a cinematic Rushmore, carving their
representations into celluloid for us to gaze up at in awe.
A similar fate befalls the working-class characters in the
film, who are lacking any real character or story at all and whose main
function seems to be to exist so we can experience both their misery and their
awakening political awareness. Our main family is a group of mill workers, with
Maxine Peake (does anyone do “hard-pressed working class stoicism hiding pain”
better than Peake?) as the matriarch, welcoming her son home from Waterloo.
These people talk at each other, quoting various current issues and bemoaning
the hardness of living at a time of near universal poverty – but other than the
fact that they are poor and suffering we are given very little reason to care
for them. Like the rest of the working-class characters, they seem more like
passengers in the film, meaning when the swords start flying, it’s actually
very hard to get worked up as much as we should as members of this family are
hacked down.
The one exception in the entire campaign-side of the
narrative comes with the introduction of “Orator” Henry Hunt, a prosperous
middle-class man who became a famed agitator for working men’s rights.
Wonderfully played, with a an air of arrogant grandiosity mixed with genuine
commitment to the cause, by Rory Kinnear, Hunt shakes up the pattern the film
settles into over its first hour. Acutely aware of his position as the nominal
head of a national movement, Hunt has little patience (and even a touch of
class-based distance) from the mostly lower middle-class campaigners he mixes
with in Manchester (while never being anything less than scrupulously polite),
and his fish-out-of-water awkwardness around them raises several laughs (the
only ones of the film). Scenes in which he imposes his own conditions on the
internal politics of the Peterloo meeting (who will speak, who will be on the
podium, will there be weapons in the ground) not only feel more real than
anything else we’ve seen in the film, but they are also far more entertaining
and engaging than anything else connected to the massacre’s build-up.
Leigh was perhaps so hidebound by wanting to honour the men
who campaigned for liberty that, other than with the larger-than-life Hunt, he seems
too restricted dramatically – as if adding too much of that essential for
drama, conflict, would somehow undermine them. Ironically he has far greater
freedom with the authorities – and the film’s more engaging sequences (outside
of those with Hunt) are all based around the arguments, clashes, plots and fury
of the various levels of authority in the country, from the corpulent Prince
Regent through the Home Office to the local magistrates.
The film gets more juice from its righteous anger at the
unfairness, arrogance and hypocrisy of these men than it does from almost
everything else. It also gives the actors playing these roles far more to work
with. Karl Johnson stands out as a stammering but adamantine Home Secretary
Lord Sidmouth, paternalistic but totally unwilling to budge an inch. The real
stars, however, are the magistrates we follow in Manchester, each introduced
trying a trivial case (drinking an employer’s wine, an argument over a watch,
stealing a coat) with ludicrous hard-line punishments (flogging and
imprisonment, transportation and execution respectively). Played with a lustful
relish by Philip Whitchurch, Jeff Rawle, Martin Savage and most expressively of
all Vincent Franklin (who nearly goes too far with the lip smacking, until a
scene later we see even the Home Office officials eagerly reading his latest
dynamite dispatch with a barely suppressed chuckles at his OTT rhetoric), these
characters argue the fine points of law and lustily denounce the working
classes with such fire and energy that you conversely get more wrapped up in
their scenes than almost anything else in the film. Maybe Leigh felt he had
greater freedom to create characters and drama here, but it does feel
unbalanced.
All that said, the massacre itself when we reach it is
brilliantly staged, immediate, deadly, meticulously reconstructed and filmed
with a documentary anger at its brutality. You can sense the creeping tension
throughout the film and the explosion of violence afterwards, for all the
problems of the film, is genuinely horrifying. In fact it wraps you up so much,
I wish the film had dealt more with the aftermath of the clash (there is a very
good scene as stunned journalists walk St Peter’s Field with horrified fury)
and the impact it had, rather than the film wrapping up swiftly with funeral of
one of its working-class characters (it’s not a surprise which one).
But then that’s part of the whole film’s problem. It feels
like a missed opportunity. It’s a stately civics lesson, a film that hammers
home the importance of what it is presenting to you, but never really gives you
a reason to invest in the real stories and passions behind the history. Instead
it presents everything as important, because it is, rather than making it important to us. It feels at the same
time a film that is preaching to the choir who already know this history
back-to-front, and also a dry history lesson introducing it to a new audience.
Either way it fails. Despite one or two good scenes, a dull, underwhelming,
preachy disappointment.
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