The successful revolt of the put-upon working class over fatuous elites trying to control their lives is obviously attractive, especially in the current moment, but the need to anchor it with studio filmmaking requirements reduces its impact and removes whatever we could learn from its history.
At first glance it’s a wonder a recreation of the Peasants’ Revolt hasn’t been attempted at some point since the Reagan Revolution. On its surface it plays directly into the anger of the commons which has been growing and growing over the last forty years. Pieces of it will sound familiar: a laborious, aggravating tax was levied on the populace of England by the council of Richard II to refill the kingdom’s coffers after costly war in continental Europe leading to open revolt in the summer of 1381. Turning on their arrogant lords, buttressed solely by the armed might of the state, they threw their overlords out and began marching on their local castles armed only with farming instruments and righteous anger. They even had a charismatic and experienced commander – Wat Tyler – binding them together into a force for violent social change. This, of course, is not who star Andrew Garfield is portraying.
Inserted instead into this violent unrest is the unnamed, schematic Ploughman who can simultaneously observe the historic actions as they unfold but, because he is a fiction, avoid any repercussions from them. He is entirely a cipher of underclass rage, first encountered ploughing his fields and mourning over the graves of his dead wife and children (killed in a recent plague) and little understood more than that across the two hours plus of run time. Director Paul Greengrass likes his suffering ineffable, playing across the faces his actors or exposed in cries and lamentations, and only rarely given voice in anything like spoken words or thoughts. The Ploughman watches and grimaces and scrunches up his face and at points when very distraught rubs mud and muck into his face and hair. There is no doubt what he is feeling, but at the same time he is responsible for nothing, except when his actions can’t matter.
Greengrass wants to use some level of verisimilitude to pull the viewer into the moment of the revolt. Just as he portrays the revolutionaries as straight forward emotional elements, all feeling and little explication, the world is expounded at a visceral, visual level. It’s a sodden smear of browns and greys mostly photographed in his trademark handheld camera as if he’d sent cinematographer Pål Ulvik Rokseth through a time portal to stick a camera in his peasants faces (which they dutifully ignore like good cinema verité participants should). By the same account he pulls in the real people involved, at least in physical form. None of them seem to be actual human beings or deal with the world as a person beyond the broadest strokes. Tyler gathers the growing mob and leads them to London where Archbishop Simon Sudbury and Robert Hales react with cartoonish plotting and bovine astonishment at the failure of the schemes and they speak only the most rudimentary wants and desires because that is all they seem be able to think. Everyone is the bare minimum of what is needed to propel the historical narrative to its next signpost.
With the Tower in the people’s hands, Sudbury and Hales and the rest of the King’s council are executed leaving the king himself to wash his hands of his venal council’s deeds and promise charters of clemency and pardon to everyone who took part, theoretically quelling the riot and bringing peace back to the land. Instead, when the people gather for their charters, they are met with the mailed fist of the King’s army as “The Uprising” reduces a year of trials and recriminations to a summary stroke of repression as the adolescent King becomes the tyrant he had been accused of being.
Had “The Uprising” had been left at that, for all its want of depth, there would be something to take from it about the shape of revolt and the circularity of class conflict. But that would leave a sour taste behind as well and we can’t have that so somewhere victory must be pulled from the mouth of defeat. Re-enter the Ploughman. After spending a protracted stretch standing on the sidelines watching characters fulfill their historical roles, he is catapulted back into the center at the point of disaster to invent a Robin Hood-esque figure who can claim moral victory in the face of utter failure. It’s a promotion that costs “The Uprising” nearly everything the first two hours earned, dodging consequence in a search for a happier ending.
The clash of class rage into the reality of change and how much it fails as succeeds is an interesting topic worthy of examination, particularly in the wake of a real historical event which touched all the relevant ideas. Modifying it for the sake of catharsis which never arrived doesn’t do anyone any favors.