IT’S PETERLOO MASSACRED!
Mike Leigh’s convoluted tale of heroic struggle is so wordy, you might nod off
Peterloo (12A) Verdict: Worthy but turgid ★★✩✩✩
MIKE LEIGH is one of Britain’s most illustrious film directors, who, unlike many of his near-contemporaries such as Ridley Scott and Alan Parker, has never taken — or perhaps never been offered — the hollywood buck.
The subjects and backdrops of his films, which he mostly writes himself while also encouraging his actors to improvise, are unwaveringly British: working- class aspirations, suburban neuroses, post-war austerity, Gilbert and Sullivan, J. M. W. Turner. his most recent feature, 2014’s Mr Turner, was an episodic account of the later years of the great artist, brilliantly played by Timothy Spall. I thought it was a masterpiece.
All of which might help to explain why I was so looking forward to Peterloo, a film years in the making and set around the same time as Mr Turner but focusing on another very British subject, one close to the director’s heart.
At St Peter’s Field, Manchester, one fateful August day in 1819, a huge but non-violent crowd of people gathered to demand political reform, which wasn’t unreasonable at a time when only two per cent of the population was entitled to vote. But the rally was rushed by mounted troops, leading to at least 19 deaths and hundreds of injuries. The massacre became known as Peterloo, marrying its location with the Battle of Waterloo just four years earlier.
Unlike Waterloo, however, this was a shameful episode in British history. Leigh feels that as a significant chapter in our collective narrative, it has been rather shockingly overlooked. even during his own childhood, in Salford, walking distance from St Peter’s Field, nobody taught him about it. With this film he intends to redress the balance.
And there, right there, is the problem. Leigh is so desperate to educate us that he overlooks too many of the rudiments of good storytelling. Peterloo is stuffed with characters, yet devoid of characterisation. Workers are noble, judges are cruel, toffs are haughty. And they all talk a lot. In fact, they hardly ever stop talking. When he wants his audience to understand issues which had huge resonance at the time, such as the Corn Laws, or ‘habeas corpus’, Leigh has his actors painstakingly explain them to one another, in a way that slowly, disastrously, leeches the film of dramatic authenticity, leaving us with little more than a dreadfully long-winded illustrated history lesson.
THE film begins in the immediate aftermath of Waterloo. A young bugler, stricken by what we now know as posttraumatic stress disorder, surveys the corpse-strewn battlefield.
This is Joseph (David Moorst), who doesn’t say much but doesn’t need to, since he is more a cipher than a character, still mutely symbolising the hypocrisies of King and country 154 long minutes later.
By then, Joseph is back in Manchester, where, in the furnace of the Industrial Revolution, tempers are boiling over. The city has no parliamentary representation and the oppressed mill workers are demanding it.
Joseph’s firebrand mam Nellie (Maxine Peake) and dad Joshua (Pearce Quigley) are at the forefront of the agitation, repeatedly reminding everyone (but especially us) of the iniquities of social injustice as perpetrated by ‘them fat leeches down London’.
Leigh makes enthusiastic use of the Lancashire vernacular, which admittedly added a layer of enjoyment at this year’s Venice Film Festival, where the Italian subtitles had to cope with ‘yer daft barmpot’.
Yet his love of the english language, far from enriching the story, undermines it. ‘Less talk, more action,’ cries fiery Nellie, at one point. I wanted to stand up and cheer, but nobody listens, least of all Leigh himself. The grandiose speechifying continues, relentlessly, with one reformer after another saying more or less the same thing, until frankly
you begin to yearn for a bit of callous slaughter, if only to shut them all up.
Villains of the piece include the Home Secretary, lord Sidmouth (Karl Johnson), who sees in the increasing unrest up North ‘the malignant spirit born of the odious French revolution’. leigh resists a caption saying ‘that nasty French business was just 30 years earlier, remember!’ — but only just.
His anxiety mounting, Sidmouth sends a hotshot soldier, General Sir John Byng (Alastair Mackenzie), to sort out the rabble. Meanwhile, the ‘malignant spirit’ has reached london, where someone chucks a potato at a coach containing the preposterous Prince regent (Tim McInnerny, in panto mode).
Finally, the forces of working- class decency and fat-cat complacency meet, at St Peter’s Field, where tens of thousands have gathered to hear (or in the absence of decent amplifiers, dimly spot in the distance) the celebrated reformer Henry Hunt (rory Kinnear).
Unfortunately, Byng has toddled off to the races. The government troops are left more or less to their own devices, with calamitous consequences. leigh evokes the actual massacre very well, with judicious use of CGI and clever cinematic sleight of hand. Predictably, too, the film is rich in period detail, enhanced by some really fine work by cinematographer dick Pope. But what a turgid bore it is, all the same.
When another of the reformers, Samuel Bamford (Neil Bell), stands up at St Peter’s Field and declares that ‘it has been a long, long journey to this place’, he’s speaking not just for the long-suffering proletariat, but for cinema audiences everywhere.