Scuppered by the marketing department, this upscale actioner applies the director's signature documentary-inspired technique to a grim chapter of 14th-century history. Among medieval hand-held farming tools, the sickle is your best bet for reaping. It’s also just the thing for deadly weaponry in times of a peasant revolt, especially one momentous enough to earn capital letters and its own year marker — the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, for instance.
In “The Uprising,” which doesn’t quite come together but has its earnest compensations, a stoic Andrew Garfield is first seen in a field against a smudge of gray sky, his farmland barely producing a crop. Garfield’s character is the Ploughman, no stranger to grief. His family has been wiped out in the Plague, along with half of England.
Gaunt and spent, he speaks little and has less. But in the brave heart of this fictional protagonist, there lurks a righteous threshing machine, ripe for a Great Rebellion in writer-director Paul Greengrass’ latest feature.This is a filmmaker whose high-end work has meant a great deal to many over the last generation. The clear-eyed, masterfully chaotic docudramas “Bloody Sunday” (dramatizing the 1972 massacre of peace protesters in Londonderry, Northern Ireland) and “United 93” (recounting the 9/11 terrorist attacks, painfully and indelibly); “Captain Phillips,” nearly as good, with Tom Hanks in charge even when he falls apart at last — these films look better every year.
The visual instincts at work in Greengrass’s movies have never not been controversial, starting and ending with his documentary-honed “shaky-cam” framing, across various cinematographer-director collaborations. That visual attack is certainly present in “The Uprising.” Some have never liked it, and won’t like it here, either. Greengrass has made period projects before, including the 19th century-set Western “News of the World,” but this one goes further back, in two directions: one toward a documentary stylization of the real, the other toward newfangled folklore and bloody, bloody myth.
For much of “The Uprising,” Garfield’s Ploughman is primarily reactive — the audience’s entry point to a time, a place and a mess of a ruling class. Slapped with a fresh round of taxes, the underclass has had enough. Around the same time the Ploughman gets off the sidelines to save a neighbor about to be killed by a short-tempered poll-tax collector, Greengrass’s screenplay positions the punk kid on the throne, 14-year-old Richard II (Woody Norman), as a contrasting study in leadership training.The king is a distorted mirror image of the Ploughman.
Garfield’s character grows into his destiny, once the ad hoc rebellion he soon joins in earnest hits London; meantime, the boy king is discreetly pushed around by the handler-oligarchs in charge. Skillfully insinuating actors on the order of Tom Hollander (Treasurer Robert Hales) and Stephen Dillane (Archbishop Sudbury) add some spice to the film’s periodic seminars in court scheming and skulking.It’s Katherine Waterston, as the wary Countess with a majorly disappointing son, whose penetrating gaze and ambiguous emotional currents show us glimmers of “The Uprising” that might have been. It’s a smallish part, but it doesn’t feel or play that way.
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