Peterloo *** (2018, Rory Kinnear, Maxine Peake, Neil Bell) – Movie Review

Mike Leigh tells the story of the notorious 1819 Peterloo Massacre, ensuring painstaking period re-creation and a strong, clear political message.

Writer-director Mike Leigh tells the alarming story of the notorious 1819 Peterloo Massacre where armed British forces were cynically sent in to break up a peaceful one-man, one-vote rally at St Peter’s Fields in Manchester, causing a massacre.

Leigh ensures painstaking period re-creation and a strong and clear political message: take to the streets and make a peaceful protest if democracy is not working, but be aware that there may be dangerous consequences.

Rory Kinnear has the main role as orator Henry Hunt, the sole speaker at Peterloo, but Maxine Peake as mother Nellie, Pearce Quigley as Joshua, Karl Johnson as the Home Secretary Lord Sidmouth and Robert Wilfort as the Prime Minister Lord Liverpool are also notable.

Mainly though, Leigh uses his actors as faces and figures in the landscape, hardly creating any characters or giving any opportunities for his performers to act. Unusually for Leigh, an actor’s director, it is all about the images and the ideas. This makes for an austere, chilly and very dark and depressing film. It is with a mounting sense of sickness that you await the film’s brilliantly staged climax sequence, and Leigh ensures the audience really does feel sick during the massacre. It is a true horror film.

Leigh should have ended with the massacre. The two post-massacre sequences (1) with the honourable journalists dubbing the massacre Peterloo and getting geared up to print the truth – no fake news here then – and (2) with the risible Prince Regent (Tim McInnerny) and Lady Conyngham (Marion Bailey) are unconvincing and misjudged.

Leigh does have some dialogue problems. Explaining history to a modern movie audience is not easy. He even feels he has to have characters explaining what habeas corpus is. It is admirable, though, that Leigh does not resort to title cards to explain his history. It is entirely a cinematic history lesson. Otherwise, he implies, you can check it up in history books, that is if there are books any more. OK, look Peterloo up on Wikipedia.

Leigh does have some problems with his characters as well. Can all the magistrates, politicians, soldiers, churchmen and royals all have been this equally stupid, greedy and oppressive? Were there no voices of dissent and reason? Well, maybe not.

Of course, Leigh is making a contemporary political tract. It is pretty clear that he sees 2018 as another version of 1819, and is pointing the way to terrible dangers ahead when countries are governed by repressive, uncaring regimes. Peterloo is a difficult film to watch and it remains difficult to contemplate afterwards. Some warmth, some humour, some hope would be nice in this chilly and chilling, gruelling movie. Even its hero, Henry Hunt, seems smug and unsympathetic, indeed there is hardly a sympathetic character in sight, not one person to identify with, and whose fate is vital or significant.

Does Mike Leigh want you to go home determined to  take part in the next People’s March or just fall into your armchair down and depressed? Well, at the very least, Peterloo is food for thought, and maybe, just maybe, for action.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Movie Review

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