Movie Review—Mike Leigh’s “Peterloo”

Peterloo
Directed by Mike Leigh 
Opened April 5, 2019 in New York
peterloo.movie.com

Mike Leigh's Peterloo

Although British director Mike Leigh’s contemporary films explore society’s cast-offs with empathy—such as those in High Hopes, Life Is Sweet, Secrets and Lies and All or Nothing—his historical projects betray an equal honest approach to his characters, and in many ways, these Leigh films are even more fascinating: Topsy-Turvy (Gilbert and Sullivan), Vera Drake (an abortionist in 1950s Britain) and Mr. Turner (master 19th century painter J.M.W. Turner).

Leigh’s latest, the incendiary Peterloo, is based on his most arcane subject yet: the 1819 massacre of British civilians by mobilized troops who stabbed, shot and trampled hundreds of men, women and children at a peaceful demonstration in Manchester about parliamentary reform and extending voting rights—both ideas that were considered radical, even treasonous, by those in power. (Since Napoleon’s 1815 defeat at Waterloo was still fresh in everyone’s mind, the event was named the “Peterloo massacre.”)

Leigh has again vividly and with the utmost clarity brought history alive in several ways. Aside from a superb Rory Kinnear as the forceful liberal orator Henry Hunt, there are no recognizable faces in a formidable cast chosen as much for looks as for ability. Leigh and his ace cinematographer, Dick Pope, shot on actual locations (if not the exact locales where many of the events occurred). Leigh—as usual—mostly eschews music, never forcing the viewer into a directed emotional response. And Leigh’s usual technique of beginning without a script and rehearsing and collaborating with his performers allows him to bring this era to the screen in a particularly tactile way; not only are the physical settings authentic but also the people themselves: through their dialects, accents, manner of speaking, and way of conversing with one another.

Needlessly to say, at over 2-1/2 hours, Peterloo is not an easy watch. Much of the film is taken up with dialogue: discussions, arguments, and speeches, whether the family of Joseph, a bugler home from the Napoleonic Wars who discovers that there’s no work for an able-bodied young man; the magistrates, councilors and merchants who run the local government, always ensuring they won’t lose their privileged status; the clueless Prince Regent, King George III’s son; or the groups of disaffected citizens who go to pubs and other places to hear like-minded speakers talk of unfair representation, rebellion and even ousting the king. 

Most bracing about Peterloo is—even more so than its brilliant recreation of its setting and events—its incisive depiction of how language can be as effective a game changer as the arms of the soldiers who so brutally broke up the peaceful assembly in Manchester. (The final tally was at least 15 dead and more than 600 seriously injured out of more than 60,000 attendees.)

It’s not coincidental that the birth of the Guardian newspaper was one of the outcomes of the Peterloo massacre; but Leigh smartly keeps on the back burner that nod to a free press amid tRump’s “fake news” and “enemy of the people” rants. Instead, Leigh makes his points with righteous anger, bluntly underlined by the final sequences which show the unbridgeable gulf between the Prince Regent’s smug response to the brutal put-down and Joseph’s devastated family at his gravesite.