The Uprising: A murky retelling of the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt

From his beginnings in television and through most of his subsequent, post-Bourne Supremacy (2004) Hollywood career, Paul Greengrass has specialised in docudramas, but never before on this scale, or reaching so far back into history. The Uprising applies his familiar shakycam technique to the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, and what the historian G. M. Trevelyan called “the most remarkable incident of our long social history – the capture of London”. Greengrass’s protagonist is a nameless Ploughman (Andrew Garfield), who instigates one of the many local tax revolts that became a mass rising of the villagers of Essex and Kent (principally), and finds himself plotting and fighting alongside the rebel leader Wat Tyler (Cosmo Jarvis) and the radical preacher John Ball (Jamie Bell), both historical figures. 

On the other side are the boy-king Richard II (Woody Norman) and his mother Joan of Kent (Katherine Waterston), who is concerned to make Richard live up to his kingly role, and his ministers, including Simon Sudbury, Archbishop of Canterbury (Stephen Dillane), and Sir Robert Hales (Tom Hollander), who are quite content with the status quo, in which they get to push Richard around. Just as Ploughman will rise up against his lord and the king’s tax collectors, so Richard will assert himself, first by lending a sympathetic ear to the rebels, much against advice, and then by taking a more robust approach when the rebels push their luck. Though the fourth wall remains intact, there is a Peter Watkins element both to the film’s handheld style and to its aspirations to class analysis. Probably the most significant character for Greengrass is William Walworth (Jonny Lee Miller), Mayor of London and representative of the rising mercantile interest.

Greengrass keeps things moving, while also attempting to portray the Christian thinking behind the revolt, through Ball and one of his disciples, Alyce (Thomasin McKenzie). Ploughman lost his family to the Black Death of 1349 – or presumably to one of its recurrences, given the dates – so is a very modern sceptic; but since we are told half the population died in the same plague, it is surprising that he is such an outlier. Because these discussions are had, rather hoarsely, in quick bursts, while on the go, they are hard to follow. For Trevelyan, last of the Whig historians, the Peasants’ Revolt was significant because it was bound up with the abolition of serfdom, before its abolition on the continent. There is no such hopefulness in the green-brown fug of The Uprising, which ends on a note of renunciation.

► The Uprising is in UK cinemas 9 October.