Peterloo

Abstract

Peterloo Thomas Prasch Peterloo 2019 Written and directed by Mike Leigh Distributed by Amazon Studios, in association with BFI, Film 4, and LipSync. www.amazon.com 154 minutes Peterloo opens on a different -loo altogether than the one its title enshrines: the battlefield of Waterloo in 1815, the closing act of the long revolutionary and Napoleonic wars that enmeshed Britain and France for over two decades after France's revolutionary regime beheaded its king. Amid the confused carnage and wreckage of the battle's closing moments, we watch a dazed and confused young British bugler blink and bumble about the ravaged landscape, occasionally tooting out a feeble bugle call. Over the course of the film's opening exposition, sandwiched amid scenes of Parliament commemorating the Duke of Wellington's triumph (with a hefty stipend of ₤750,000), of the workaday life of Manchester's working class, and of cabinet officials and military brass worrying about seditious tendencies in the North, we then follow the bugler's long trudge back home to Manchester, where he arrives in a weepy, war-stunned near catatonia (and where we finally learn at least his first name: Joseph). He dons his redcoat uniform—by then rather the worse for wear—near the film's end as he joins his family and thousands of other reform-demanding workers as they gathered in St. Peter's Field to hear radical Henry Hunt ("Orator Hunt," as he was popularly known; played by Rory Kinnear), a peaceful demonstration violently dispersed by sword-wielding cavalry and bayonet-bearing infantry (estimates place the number killed at some dozen or more dead, including women and children, with 500-600 injured), earning its sobriquet Peterloo. Even for film viewers who have adjusted to Mike Leigh's late-career leap from darkly-limned and darkly comic) kitchen-sink-realist portraits of contemporary working-class lives (think High Hopes [1988] or Naked [1993], for example) to films about historical subjects (bringing us backstage with Gilbert and Sullivan in Topsy-Turvy [1999]; portraying an abortionist in the 1950s, before the procedure was legal, in Vera Drake [2004]; tangling to understand the visual splendor of late J. M. W. Turner paintings in Mr. Turner [2014]), Peterloo seems a surprising departure: working with the biggest budget in his career ($18 million, still awfully low by Hollywood standards, but a lot for Leigh) to create a serious, even somber epic memorialization of a dramatic tragedy in British working-class history. In interviews, Leigh has insisted that his making of Peterloo—its release timed to match the bicentennial of the massacre—intended to draw attention to a moment in working-class British history too little remembered or too quickly passed over (see, for example, Vulture, 4 April 2019, or World Socialist Web Site, 5 April 2019). The assertion will somewhat surprise historians who well recall E. P. Thompson's assertion that the event was "without question a formative experience in British political and social history" (The Making of the English Working Class [1963], 687; boldface in original), or who know Robert Reid's carefully researched Peterloo Massacre (1989). To be fair, however, Leigh's perspective coincides with the slowness with which official Manchester marked the historical ground (it was only in 2007 that a plaque marked the square with a properly complete account). A. O. Scott, in his review of the film, aptly notes that "Peterloo has the sweep of Tolstoy and the bustle of Dickens" (New York Times, 4 April 2019). The Tolstoy shows in sweep and range, the leaps from dirty streets and factory floors to royal suites and halls of Parliament, and as well in the masses of the film, the deep range of characters (some four dozen named characters in the cast list, a rich mix of fictional creations and actual historical figures) and the massed crowds of extras. But Scott continues: "It's crowded with noble, villainous and comical characters: police spies and magistrates; radical firebrands and anxious liberals; pompous officials and plain-spoken workers; servants, tradesman, gossips, thugs and children. … Everyone carries a spark of individuality. Every voice and face is something to remember." In such details, the more dominant Dickens side shows. Indeed...