A Better Class Of Jacquerie

There’s a long-standing joke about historical fiction that asks: What is the difference between good historical fiction and bad historical fiction? Answer – the good stuff tells you about the period that it’s set in; the bad stuff tells you about the period that it’s written in.  So it’s a rare pleasure to say that Paul Greengrass’ film ‘Uprising’ about the events of 1381 known to history as The Peasants’ Revolt manages to be simultaneously both really rather good and quite bad (in a good sort of way). 

First, the good stuff:  Greengrass’ dramaturgy makes the political personal and does a decent job of the most difficult challenge for anyone portraying the pre-industrial world: letting a modern audience understand the central importance of religion to everyday experience and personal and social identity.  It’s a joy to see renegade priest John Ball made flesh by Jamie Bell, Cosmo Jarvis’ Wat Tyler is half-thug half-chancer, and Woody Norman’s Richard II is a petulantly un-formed posh-boy whose development from neurotic instability into cold tyranny is arrestedly enigmatic. 

And the narrative is cleverly centred on the experience of Andrew Garfield’s entirely fictional ‘Plowman’, who wanders in and out of history with a look of ill-used perplexity that reinforces the notion that the experience of social paralysis and collapse is all contingent and immediate, not a narrative being looked back on as something determined and understood.  So far, all good.

But there’s bad stuff too – 21^st Century talking-points are shoe-horned into the dialogue (‘the sickness’, 'deplorables’, ‘patriots’, ‘elites’, ‘your loyal commons’), but just occasionally Greengrass pulls off a genuinely thought-provoking parallel.  The suggestion that the royal scriptorium is a sort of  monk-powered internet flooding the zone with shit by which the masses can be fatally manipulated is actually rather clever (and Richard’s putative Muskalike ‘Scribe’ comes to a reassuringly sticky end). 

More objective is the (accurate) absence of any convenient external scapegoat.  Sure, there’s overproduction of new elites in the shape of Jonny Lee Miller’s gangsterish Lord Mayor of London, but Greengrass makes it clear that rabble army and Plantagenet uni-party are both spatch-cocked coalitions of divergent interests.  Class difference rooted in economic oppression is the engine of perpetual commotion here.  And in the end the violence of power temporarily resolves the conflict of opposites.     

Greengrass’ mud-encrusted England is shot through with a thoroughly un-nostalgic sepia and a semi-permanent day-for-night. One can only regret, in a society where 1% of the population is opulently bejewelled, 99% caked in last autumn’s dried cowshit, the lack of rats and malignant dermatology.  But there are some breathtaking pieces of cinematography: a reverse-zoom dolly of the peasant army beneath the city walls, and most spectacularly the betrayal of the commons, where Greengrass’ jump-cutting of music and sounds against smoothly choreographed horsemanship and swordplay is reminiscent of Akira Kurosawa’s finest samurai action. 

It’s therefore unfortunate that the film’s coda delivers a fatuously a-historical grounding of the Robin Hood myth in the survivors of Tyler’s army.  But there’s more – in an entirely fictional scene Plowman and King come to a late reckoning, part-Python mud-wrestlers’ brawl that, it’s implied, tips Richard back into psychological collapse.  Across eight hundred years, history is still a vexed nightmare from which we are all, elite and deplorable alike, failing to wake up.  The fire, next time?