Peterloo (Mike Leigh, 2018)

This is a somewhat unconventional effort from Mike Leigh, who has tended in his period pieces to avoid "big history" and to explore important matters from the inside out. Mr. Turner used its protagonist as a kind of spoke from which the mores of the late-19th century world of British painting could radiate, serving as very specific details within a grounded story. The same could be said of Topsy Turvy and Vera Drake as well. The former got inside the nuts and bolts of theatrical creation; the latter (although centered on a fictional character) was organized as a demonstration of the individual tragedies that the illegality of abortion precipitated, trusting us to understand that they were metonymic.

By contrast, Peterloo is a methodical exegesis on the St. Peter's Massacre of 1819, starting off at the end of the Battle of Waterloo, as if to make sure we would understand later how "Peterloo" got its name. There are dozens of players: radicals, magistrates, the impoverished industrial workers of Manchester, right on up to the Prime Minister (Robert Wilfort) and the Prince Regent (Tim McInnerny). Leigh's purpose is clear. He wants to demonstrate that the ruling classes, all of them, had blood on their hands, slaughtering innocent working class men, women, and children gathered in a peaceful protest for parliamentary reform. And of course, any resonances the scene may have with the present day are more than welcome.

But something is amiss. Peterloo is what I would call an interesting failure, although it is always worthy and frequently quite absorbing. As a student of rhetoric, I am personally intrigued by the speeches made by the reformers and the grandiloquent letters of condemnation by the magistrates and reverends, not only as speech acts that define historical classes (the kind of linguistic jostling Mikhail Bakhtin discusses in Discourse in the Novel), but as a portrait of the distance (for better or worse) that political gab has come. Likewise, Leigh's extremely dispersed focus -- dozens of characters with significant speaking parts -- allows us to see not only the differing opinions within both the reformist movements and the ruling classes, but to observe the frequent disconnect between highfalutin talk on the hustings and the actual comprehension of the people allegedly being served.

If anything, Leigh underscores this point a bit too heavily, and this is the case with many of his characterizations and oratory passages. Without a few central characters, we never get as fully invested as we might otherwise have. There is a tension within Peterloo that is never quite resolved, between a meticulous period recreation and a more Brechtian lehrstücke type of effort. The dichotomies between the classes, between the native Mancunian reformers like Samuel Bamford (Neil Bell) and the pompous Londoner Henry Hunt (Rory Kinnear), and even between the younger members of the Women's Reformist group and the older, traditionalist womenfolk (who call the protesters "whores"), are all too neatly drawn. 

This produces a cognitive dissonance between the writing and acting, on one hand, and the direction and visual style on the other. D.P. Dick Pope generates some glorious vistas, but what are we to make of them? Likewise, his treatment of the grotty interiors of the homes of the poor, and the lighting of the grimy women in particular, turns every other shot into a Vermeer. How much are we supposed to believe in this world? And to what extent is Peterloo more of a teaching tool, a beautifully appointed encyclopedia entry?