Have Not: THE UPRISING

There was a good decade where Paul Greengrass was among the most exciting mainstream directors working. He followed up an early career spent in documentaries and British television with some electrifying feature films. He brought a jumpy handheld aesthetic and docudrama realism to overlapping dialogue, matter-of-fact procedure, and intense emotional specificity. He made fact-based re-enactments with propulsive thriller mechanics that shook with a sense of political outrage, showing us an English massacre of Irish protestors in Bloody Sunday, or a hijacked plane on 9/11 in United 93. He added to the realism of his look and tone by casting a mixture of professional actors and amateurs whose day jobs were the roles they portrayed. These are overwhelming effective movies. In another excellent effort he dramatized the takeover of a freighter by pirates, and the daring rescue of the crew, in Captain Phillips, building to star Tom Hanks’ finest few minutes of acting as he decompresses from the trauma. Greengrass also built Matt Damon’s great Bourne franchise, helming three of his four outings as the amnesiac spy trying to piece back together the conspiracy in which he’s a central victim. As writer-director, Greengrass could always be counted on to make films with verisimilitude and direct political engagement. His next group of movies—dreary mass shooting drama 22 July, fine western News of the World, and solid real-life disaster movie The Last Bus—recaptured that magic incompletely. They weren’t without their lesser strengths, but they were movies somehow outside the zeitgeist. 

It’s nice to find that his latest, The Uprising, finds him returning to the appeal of his earlier films, transplanting his aesthetic and thematic concerns to the late Middle Ages for a recounting of the 1381 peasants’ revolt. It’s transparently a movie with modern resonance, with snarling upper class entitlement, encroaching authoritarianism, and fractured political expectation. Is it any wonder he’d be drawn to a movie about a post-plague world stumbling toward economic collapse exacerbated by widening inequality? He films the muddy protestors with bobbing over-the-shoulder following shots and rushing-to-keep-up traveling takes, whip-pans, and snap-zooms. Andrew Garfield plays a humble ploughman who semi-accidentally kicks off the uprising after resisting the onerous new taxes imposed by young tyrant King Richard II (Woody Norman). There are terrific scenes of the downtrodden treading toward London in long lines of protest. They rhyme interestingly with Bloody Sunday’s doomed march, and echo across time when this uprising also reaches a violent conclusion. The movie’s full of character actors young and old (Tom Hollander, Jamie Bell, Cosmo Jarvis, Jonny Lee Miller, Katherine Waterson, and so on) playing period dress-up, and spouting off dialogue that’s largely expositional. The movie remains frustratingly surface-level in this way. It’s all posing picture book history with all the surface grit and none of the characterization that would really make it grow beyond the obvious. Though it nonetheless has effective sequences throughout, it puts them between tedium and obviousness. It also undercuts a fine dreary ending with an epilogue that feels like wishful thinking (and overtly modern thinking) tacked on after the fact. The result is a movie with everything in place for success and then it just slowly deflates instead. I’m still looking forward to the next great Paul Greengrass movie.