THE UPRISING Review: Brooding Andrew Garfield Leads a Semi-Enthralling Medieval Epic

For a brief, not-quite-shining moment, Paul Greengrass’ (Captain Phillips, United 93, the Jason Bourne series) latest film, The Uprising, bore a subtitle added by studio marketers, “The Rise of Robin Hood,” only to remove it after howls of outrage from the Terminally Online.

 

They claimed, not without justification or cause, that the Robin Hood mythos had been adapted and re-adapted so many times in every possible medium as to lose all relevance or, at a minimum, any possible novelty or freshness.

 

Luckily for them and for any moviegoers venturing out of the oppressive heat into their local multiplex to see The Uprising, Greengrass’ film doesn’t retell the overly-familiar Robin Hood’s story for the 357th time, but instead focuses on a well-documented period in English history, the 1381 Peasants' Revolt that almost — operative here word being, of course, “almost” — reconfigured England’s political and economic systems away from the stifling authoritarianism of feudal monarchies and into a representative democracy (with or without a constitutional monarch). 

 

That the Peasants' Revolt didn’t end satisfactorily for the insurrectionists shouldn’t come as a surprise, nor should it be considered a “spoiler” of any kind. And with Greengrass, here writing as well as directing, inserting a purely fictional character, Andrew Garfield’s self-described “Ploughman” (no first name, no surname, just what he does) as viewpoint character and audience surrogate, only whether he survives to and/or through the end of the credits remains an open question.

 

Until we reach The Uprising's final ten minutes, we follow the Ploughman, the lone survivor of the Black Death in his immediate family, as he mightily struggles to farm a rocky, patchy plot of land, before joining his fellow toilers in the field for an ill-fated meet-and-greet with the king’s imperious tax collector. 

 

Unable to provide proof of the deaths of his wife and children, the Ploughman naturally bristles at the inherent unfairness of a system that exploits peasants for tax revenue so the boy-king, Richard II (Woody Norman, C'mon, C'mon), and his greedy, power-hungry council can fund their wars of conquest and occupation abroad. An unlikely spokesperson and even unlikelier leader, the Ploughman reacts with murderous rage when the tax collector and the soldiers assigned to him sexually assault the village’s young women to prove (or disprove) whether they’ve reached sexual maturity or not. If they have, then they pay the poll taxes of an adult, not a minor. 

 

It proves to be one of the indignities too much for the Ploughman and the villagers who join him in attacking the tax collector and the soldiers, ultimately leaving the soldiers dead and only the tax collector and a young scribe alive. Collectively, the villagers want a redress for their grievances, to take said grievances to the king they practically worship as a (near) deity who, when he discovers the graft, corruption, and abuse done in his name, will respond accordingly (i.e., justice for the victimized peasantry, imprisonment or worse for the abusers). 

 

Taking the long, non-scenic route to London, the Ploughman meets and joins two verifiable historical figures, Wat Tyler (Cosmo Jarvis), a former soldier in the king’s army and the de facto leader of the revolt, and John Ball (Jamie Bell), a defrocked, heretic priest whose sermons argue for both a more egalitarian future and a so-called “miracle” only the king, as God’s earthly messenger, can provide the peasants. 

 

Unsurprisingly, their unqualified faith in a perfect, angelic monarch and their distrust of his royal council and courtiers lead, inevitably enough, to foreseeably disastrous results. As tantalizingly close as the Peasants' Revolt gets to achieving its aims, it’s undermined by badly misplaced trust in their king and a tendency, like many or most revolts, rebellions, and revolutions, to engage in disproportionate violence. As a collective, the peasants and their aims remain — then and now — admirable, if not outright unimpeachable, but those aims expressed through disorganized or partially organized mobs lead to deaths (here, random functionaries loyal to the council and not the king, or, in an otherwise justifiable endeavor, the xenophobic targeting of Flemish merchants).

 

As the film's viewpoint character, audience stand-in, and secondary leader, the Ploughman repeatedly retreats into the background, leaving him a willing observer or occasional participant, counseling caution, restraint and only using violence when necessary (i.e., in self-defense). Too often, though, that leaves Garfield little to do except brood as Tyler and Ball, the actual leaders of the Peasants' Revolt both historically and in the film, respond to the chaos of changing events with a mix of ruthlessness and, ultimately, the unjustified faith in the king that will lead to their downfall and the end of the Peasants' Revolt.

 

Typical for Greengrass’s multi-decade filmography, the camera stays resolutely rooted to ground level, only occasionally giving moviegoers a top-down, hawk’s-eye view of the peasants' procession through a mud- and muck-caked countryside, their entry into various towns, and eventually, London itself and the infamous tower. Just as typically, Greengrass employs a constantly moving, twitchy camerawork, rapid-fire, nausea-inducing editing, and all-too-infrequent moments of stasis, usually saved for explanatory scenes, to depict the Peasants' Revolt from its first promising salvos at a cruel, exploitative socio-economic structure (contemporary relevance alert), through to the historically mandated end. 

 

Right up until an ill-judged, tacked-on, groan-worthy epilogue, The Uprising at least had a relative fidelity to the historical record as a defense against Greengrass's narrative and aesthetic choices. Once Greengrass unnecessarily flashes forward a year for the epilogue, whatever goodwill in Greengrass’ project to dramatize a turning point in English history disappears almost entirely, souring an already downbeat experience into unmitigated disappointment.