Peterloo | Little White Lies

Peter­loo

29 Oct 2018 / Released: 02 Nov 2018

Words by Adam Woodward

Directed by Mike Leigh

Starring Maxine Peake and Rory Kinnear

Crowd of people in historical clothing, some holding banners, gathered in a city street with buildings in the background.
Crowd of people in historical clothing, some holding banners, gathered in a city street with buildings in the background.
4

Anticipation.

Mike Leigh always means business.

3

Enjoyment.

A bit of a slog all told, but perhaps intentionally so.

4

In Retrospect.

An earnest, colourful portrait of liberty and tyranny in 19th century England.

Vet­er­an film­mak­er Mike Leigh deliv­ers a his­to­ry les­son about the oft-for­got­ten 1819 Peter­loo Mas­sacre in Manchester.

With the UK gov­ern­ment locked in a self-per­pet­u­at­ing, seem­ing­ly end­less dis­pute over Brex­it, it’s fit­ting that Mike Leigh has cho­sen anoth­er calami­tous polit­i­cal saga as the sub­ject of his lat­est fea­ture. Part his­to­ry les­son, part estab­lish­ment satire, the stal­wart writer/director’s fol­low-up to 2014’s Mr Turn­er sees him return to a region close to his heart – the north­west of Eng­land – in order to tell the sto­ry of a trag­ic and entire­ly avoid­able clash that fun­da­men­tal­ly changed Britain.

On 16 August, 1819, a peace­ful pro-democ­ra­cy ral­ly was bro­ken up by the Man­ches­ter Yeo­man­ry, a local force of vol­un­teer cav­al­ry­men por­trayed here as a booze-soaked mob. Dozens of inno­cent men, women and chil­dren lost their lives in the mêlée, bru­tal­ly cut down by the Yeo­mans’ sabres and tram­pled by their hors­es, with hun­dreds more injured. Dubbed The Peter­loo Mas­sacre’ by local jour­nal­ist James Wroe, the inci­dent caused wide­spread pub­lic out­cry, boost­ing sup­port for the nascent suf­frage move­ment and lead­ing to the foun­da­tion of the Guardian newspaper.

Many of the pro­tes­tors had trav­elled to St Peter’s Field in Man­ches­ter from neigh­bour­ing towns and vil­lages to hear the main speak­er of the day, Hen­ry Hunt, a self-styled man of the peo­ple who advo­cat­ed rad­i­cal action through non-vio­lent means. Yet when Hunt (played with rel­ish by Rory Kin­n­ear) final­ly deliv­ers his ill-fat­ed address towards the end of the film, his words do not reach every­one. Leigh re-enacts the speech large­ly from the per­spec­tive of a fam­i­ly stood some­where near the mid­dle of the immense crowd, tan­ta­lis­ing­ly out of earshot – the impli­ca­tion being that it often takes more than con­vic­tion and a sol­id plat­form to get a mes­sage across. Espe­cial­ly when that mes­sage threat­ens to upset the sta­tus quo.

If Leigh ulti­mate­ly ensures that Hunt’s point is made loud and clear by the time the clos­ing cred­its roll, he does so with­out lion­is­ing the revered ora­tor. In fact, he demys­ti­fies Hunt, reveal­ing him to be a rather bland and boor­ish man. More grandil­o­quent than gal­lant, he saun­ters around in his trade­mark white top hat with the air of a man who deems him­self above those whose inter­ests he seeks to pro­mote. Hunt is no hero.

Peter­loo is no paean for the poor and peren­ni­al­ly oppressed, no Dick­en­sian post­card of social inequal­i­ty, no roman­ti­cised vision of work­ing class life. With strong assists from cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Dick Pope, cos­tumer design­er Jacque­line Dur­ran and pro­duc­tion design­er Suzie Davies (among oth­ers), Leigh takes us inside the cramped slums and cav­ernous fac­to­ries, but cru­cial­ly he nev­er lingers on the squalid con­di­tions in which the major­i­ty of peo­ple lived and worked.

Leigh’s inten­tion is mere­ly to high­light the sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tion that ordi­nary labour­ers, home­mak­ers and small busi­ness own­ers made (both in a com­mu­ni­ty and wider eco­nom­ic sense) dur­ing the Indus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tion, as well as the impact they had in the devel­op­ment of our mod­ern demo­c­ra­t­ic sys­tem. Though it is always clear where the film’s sym­pa­thies lie, as a his­tor­i­cal record Peter­loo ben­e­fits great­ly from Leigh’s even-hand­ed, unsen­ti­men­tal approach. It may lack some­thing of the emo­tion­al elo­quence of Ter­ence Davies, or the fin­ger-jab­bing indig­na­tion of Ken Loach, but the result is an acute­ly-observed sur­vey of the class divide that exist­ed in 19th cen­tu­ry Britain.

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