Mike Leigh (2018)
Mike Leigh began his long career as a writer and director for the screen in the early 1970s. Until nearly the turn of the millennium, his television plays and film were always set in the present day. His first period piece Topsy-Turvy (1999) came as a surprise and a revelation – it remains one of Leigh’s best films, along with the more recently historical Vera Drake (2004). Mr Turner (2014), though less successful, didn’t fail as a recreation of the nineteenth century. But now along comes Peterloo.
Leigh’s latest work marks the two hundredth anniversary next year of the Peterloo Massacre, when armed government militia charged a mass demonstration, demanding parliamentary reform and the extension of voting rights, in St Peter’s Fields, Manchester. The film, which starts in 1815 after the Battle of Waterloo, is set in a time before the discovery of overlapping dialogue. Characters deliver their lines without interruption, whether in the House of Commons or a public house or a family home. (A bit of orderly rhubarb-rhubarb is the most anyone gets in terms of reaction.) A main reason for this is that the people in Peterloo, whatever the context, are speechifying rather than conversing. When Nellie (Maxine Peake) and Joshua (Pearce Quigley) discuss the economic impact of the Corn Laws, they talk in journalese. Their family can’t afford to put food on the table but they obviously read the Guardian[1].
As for the public speakers, people on the screen keep saying what a fine orator X or Y is and how they inspire an audience. With the qualified exception of the radical Henry Hunt (Rory Kinnear), who exerts himself enough for his forehead to perspire, they never are and they never do. I need to qualify ‘never’. Peterloo runs 154 minutes, Sally and I walked out after about ninety, and perhaps everything changes in the last hour (though that would be surprising). If Leigh used his usual technique for developing the piece with his actors that could explain a lot – many of them will be Guardian readers (Maxine Peake is even the current voiceover for Guardian ads). At any rate, the writer-director and his huge cast are not just conscious of the nobility of their enterprise – they seem paralysed by it. The only credible, natural characterisation I saw came from Philip Jackson as the pioneer trade unionist John Knight.
The film we watched often played like a spoof of angry, earnest political drama – but a spoof of Ken Loach rather than Mike Leigh. The powers-that-be and their henchmen in Peterloo are caricatured baddies. Presenting authority and establishment figures in a negative, one-dimensional light is familiar in Loach’s cinema too. Leigh’s version is worse, though: he’s spent much of his film-making life making cruelly effective fun of people and still hasn’t quite lost his appetite for that. I doubt Loach would have allowed, for example, the grotesquely overdone performance Leigh gets – and presumably wanted – from Vincent Franklin as a malignant magistrate. This is the sort of turn liable to be praised as ‘deliciously nasty’ but it’s just terrible acting. There’s plenty more of that in the film – though not all in Franklin’s style. David Moorst is Nellie’s and Joshua’s hapless son George, who appears to walk all the way back from the Waterloo battlefield to Manchester (and to lose a kit bag as he finally gets back home). George is portrayed as a simpleton with a nervous twitch – Moorst, regular as clockwork, dutifully twitches each time he sees the camera heading his way.
Dick Pope’s supple lighting has the effect of throwing into sharper relief the contrived grimness of what Leigh has put on the screen. To be fair to Ken Loach, he would surely have aimed for a consistently realistic treatment: Leigh is stuck in a no man’s land between realism and … well, something else. There’s a good bit early on that describes working conditions at a cotton mill, contrasting the deafening noise of the machinery inside the building and the quiet outside as the product is piled onto transport. But this almost documentary sequence is a one-off beside the stylisation (a euphemism) of the political speech-making, the occasional songs, the public gatherings choreography (another euphemism), and so on. The making of this film provided employment for a great many people in front of and behind the camera. That’s about the best that can be said for the leaden, preachy Peterloo.
8 November 2018
[1] The Manchester Guardian was founded in 1821 in the aftermath to the Peterloo Massacre but with what now seems a surprising political motivation. The newspaper’s founder was, according to Wikipedia, ‘cotton merchant John Edward Taylor with backing from the Little Circle, a group of non-conformist businessmen. …They launched their paper after the police closure of the more radical Manchester Observer, a paper that had championed the cause of the Peterloo Massacre protesters. …Taylor had been hostile to the radical reformers … ‘
