Andrew Garfield<\/a>) living a grief-filled and wretched existence, a plague has wiped out half the population. A small group of men hoards wealth and resources, while the peasant class is heavily taxed, laws brutally enforced. As Greengrass lays out the bare facts of this situation with a cinematic style that\u2019s more news documentary than stuffy period piece, the parallels to our own current situation are laid bare.<\/p>\n\u201cThe Uprising,\u201d which Greengrass wrote and directed, is told in a fairly simple fashion, with an emphasis on visual storytelling and visceral sensation (the disparate English accents are also lost in the melee of the mob). All we need to know is that the council advising the 14-year-old King Richard II (Woody Norman) conspires while the young royal prays and his mother (Katherine Waterston) glowers. Outside, a bloodthirsty mob armed with farm tools marches on London, led in part by Garfield\u2019s ploughman, who started his own local uprising when he fought back against the taxman. He joins forces with Wat Tyler (Cosmo Jarvis), a former soldier, and John Ball (Jamie Bell), a priest deemed heretic, as the crowd demands an audience with the king.<\/p>\n
As the chaos unfolds, Greengrass doesn\u2019t pontificate on the morality of these events and, in fact, maintains a rather neutral stance on them for most of the film, withholding judgment. A revolution is not right or wrong for most of \u201cThe Uprising.\u201d It is simply inevitable under the conditions the film presents.<\/p>\n
The ploughman wants to play by the rules, but it\u2019s how the revolt plays out that radicalizes him. While Greengrass shows us the uprising in all its messy confusion as the logical outcome of oppression, by following our protagonist as he witnesses treachery and deceit, Greengrass ultimately arrives at the belief that revolution is necessary, even in failure, and that freedom is worth more than anything.<\/p>\n
The opening and closing of \u201cThe Uprising\u201d are bracing and stark in their storytelling \u2014 the middle is a bit mushy and confusing. But it\u2019s the performances that carry us through. Garfield, sensitive and earthy, is our bellwether as the events descend into bloody carnage dictated by muddled agendas. When he turns, we turn, and the anguish that Garfield wordlessly conveys is our compass.<\/p>\n
Greengrass surrounds Garfield with actors who deliver bigger performances, like Jarvis as the brutish but shrewd Tyler, and Bell as the fervent Ball. Thomasin McKenzie plays a young woman, Alyce, steeped in her own trauma and loss, who attaches herself to the ploughman, and her ability to express wide-eyed, barely contained hysteria and fear is unmatched. Young Norman is riveting as the increasingly dastardly king.<\/p>\n
The Peasant\u2019s Revolt of 1381 is a fascinating moment because it\u2019s a time when the notion of democracy wasn\u2019t even a twinkle in a feudal servant\u2019s eye. The mob\u2019s actions are frustrating because they\u2019re religiously bound to the king, who they believe is an emissary of God, and desperate to change their day-to-day existence. When those two instincts collide, it\u2019s bound to be complex and conflicting, and Greengrass delivers that with a boots-on-the-ground style.<\/p>\n
The murkiness of it all clarifies by the end of the film, not just in terms of its heroes, villains and message, but Greengrass also situates this story within a recognizable cinematic and storytelling history. There\u2019s a thrill as it all comes together. Greengrass might be taking a big swing (of the scythe), but his blade finds its target nevertheless.<\/p>\n
Walsh is a Tribune News Service film critic.<\/p>\n
‘The Uprising’<\/p>\n
Rated: R, for violence\/bloody images<\/p>\n
Running time: 2 hours, 8 minutes<\/p>\n
Playing: Opens Friday, Sept. 11 in wide release<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Filmmaker Paul Greengrass is often associated with a cinematic aesthetic colloquially known as \u201cshaky cam\u201d \u2014 handheld cinematography…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":460948,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[6650,119923,181751,181748,1924,181742,181747,664,48,52,51,47,50,49,181746,181744,181750,181745,66855,181743,181749],"class_list":["post-460947","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-action","tag-andrew-garfield","tag-bare-fact","tag-cosmo-jarvis","tag-film","tag-greengrass","tag-jamie-bell","tag-king","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-mob","tag-pathetic-ploughman","tag-peasant-class","tag-revolt","tag-revolution","tag-uprising","tag-visual-storytelling"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/460947","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=460947"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/460947\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/460948"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=460947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=460947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=460947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}