The Uprising Keeps Its Hands Too Clean

One of the earliest scenes in Paul Greengrass’s The Uprising is a tax collection where we meet poor villagers in the Essex marshes standing in line before a table at a tithe barn. The plague left them with nothing and killed some of the people the crown now wants money from. If that wasn’t bad enough, the guards begin lifting young women’s skirts and reaching between their legs to decide if they are old enough to pay.

Andrew Garfield’s farmer steps in and beats one of the gropers to death. Within days, the law arrives demanding to arrest the attacker, or else others would be held accountable for what he did. The anonymous farmer, known only in the film as Ploughman, turns himself in. “I struck a man to protect a child. I’ll pay for it.” As they prepare to hang him, a band of villagers ambushes the chief justice’s escort, and Greengrass stages it with the speed and confusion he does better than anyone.

Word of the ambush starts spreading, and before long thousands of farmers are making their way to London to petition the king. The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 is born. Greengrass shoots it the way he shot United 93, handheld and in the middle of the crowd. Combined with the period costumes and the Bavarian locations, the immersion works. For a while, at least. By the second hour, I wanted him to put the camera down so I could spend more time in the world he painstakingly built.

Different factions emerge on the road. There are the moderates, those like Ploughman who simply want the tax gone and a hearing. You also have Wat Tyler (Cosmo Jarvis), a former soldier who becomes the rebellion’s commander and wants the tax gone too, along with fixed rents and better wages. The radicals rally around John Ball (Jamie Bell), a renegade priest who wants the counselors’ heads and times their arrival in London for Corpus Christi, “the great feast day of miracles.”

What no one says they want to do is overthrow Richard II, England’s 14-year-old monarch. In fact, they swear loyalty “to our cause and to our king.” Ploughman says it plainly to His Highness’s own mother when he encounters her on the road: Richard, in their view, is held hostage by his council, and they have marched to free him. Whatever else this rebellion is, it begins as an act of faith in the crown.

Richard and his council come down the Thames by boat to meet the marchers. Nobody gets off. The advisers dispatch an emissary ashore to say there will be no meeting. That is more than the crowd can take, and the men and women who marched to the capital now descend on the city as a mob.

Up to this point, Greengrass has spent an hour handling the politics of this revolt with more sophistication than most films manage. That is harder than it sounds, since any political film these days gets read through our own partisan categories before the credits roll. As if to head that off, he has an adviser urge Richard to defend his kingdom from “these deplorables,” and later a peasant gets to say “no kings.”

Unfortunately, the moral picture gets too convenient on the other side of the river. Tyler’s men catch up with Richard’s officials and deliver what one calls “people’s justice.” Ploughman looks on with disapproval, but you can almost see the film drawing a line — far too neatly — between their killings and the murder of civilians. The Uprising goes out of its way to pin the latter on random rabble-rousers who infiltrated the march once it reached the city, while the movement owns only the beheadings of the villains.

Films don’t owe us the accuracy of a documentary, but this is one place where greater fidelity to the historical record would have made for a better story. The Anonimalle Chronicle, the fullest contemporary account of the revolt, records 35 Flemings dragged out of one church and killed on the spot. The rebels would have been more credible if the screenplay had let them do that.

Richard has a believability problem of his own. Woody Norman is commendable in the part, especially once the boy goes cold, but his change from benevolent ruler to ruthless tyrant seems too sudden. Was a scene left on the cutting room floor? Or perhaps Richard’s sudden cruelty is meant to justify the peasants’ radicalization. As though we should read everything we’ve witnessed up to that point through that act of betrayal.

Clever, but revolutions are never this clean.