As he approaches the twilight of his career, Mike Leigh, perhaps the best and certainly the most idiosyncratic of British filmmakers, has increasingly turned to history to explore his feelings about what it means to be English. His two most prominent historical films, Topsy-Turvy and Mr. Turner, dwelled on the world of the arts, offering Leigh a means of looking at his position on the vector of creativity. His latest, however, is bitingly political, even polemical. It addresses an incident that happened on August 16, 1819, in the city of Manchester. A peaceful pro-democracy demonstration was attacked by British soldiers dispatched by local leaders. Dozens were killed and hundreds injured. Dubbed “Peterloo” because of its temporal proximity to the fateful battle that defeated Napoleon and the fact that it took place on St. Peter’s Field, the event, according to Leigh, should be taught to every British school child, but it’s mostly been lost to time. With his usual scrupulousness, he shows how the massacre came about and what it means for today’s world.
Unfortunately, Leigh’s two-and-a-half-hour film seems likely to meet the same fate as the incident itself. Several months after it played theatrically in the UK, it is mostly forgotten, doomed by negative reviews from critics who normally champion Leigh. They found it wordy, boring, and nagging. Leigh has, of course, done political content before, but he never sacrificed the dramatic appeal of his peculiar method just to make a point. Here, he’s dry and academic, and yet for me, a Yank who happens to love history, it was a revelation as both exegesis and theater. Leigh’s actors speak in bountiful phrases that sound nothing like political speech today, and that may be the problem for most people. To them it sounds like the most opaque Shakespearean poetry, but apparently Leigh worked close with contemporary documents to get the language accurate, and what comes through is the kind of passion for engagement that is, in and of itself, dramatically compelling.
But, most importantly, Peterloo is an angry film, which makes it the opposite of boring in Leigh’s hands. Wellington’s soldiers return from their victory broken and disillusioned while their leader basks in material and public glory. Leigh focuses on one PTSD-wracked redcoat, Joseph (David Moorst), who returns not to a hero’s welcome, but to a family plunged into poverty by rising prices that the government seems ill-equipped to tackle. Eventually, the workers and farmers rise up and demand action, and the response is pure reactionary arrogance. The lords in London, rather than huddle to find a solution, immediately conspire to put down what they see as insurrectionary ungratefulness. Leigh throws us into meetings on both sides of the argument, and doesn’t spare us the lengthy speeches and explanations. It is one of the film’s singular strengths that the characters, even at their voluble worst, convey complications of personality that set the stakes. At the center is Henry Hunt (Rory Kinnear), one of the era’s great orators, who takes up the working man’s cause much to the delight of the people, though it is his pointed loquaciousness that makes him a lightning rod for conservative ire and focuses that enmity to no good end. It doesn’t help that Hunt is proud and smug.
The inevitability of the massacre is as certain as it would be in any disaster movie, and Leigh ratchets up the tension without resorting to specious musical or editing cues. But it’s the detail that is so effective: the troops, understanding their mission, getting drunk on the morning of the massacre; the nobility in their silly finery getting so worked up in their hatred for the hoi polloi they literally spit out their invective; the innocence of the “rabble” as they assemble in the field to hear a fine speech by Hunt that they know they won’t understand. The horror that follows has been given a context that is unmistakable and, even more horrifying, universal in its applicability.
Opens Aug. 9 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001).
Peterloo home page in Japanese.
photo (c) Amazon Content Services LLC, Film 4 a division of Channel Four Television Corporation and the British Film Institute 2018
It’s easy to see why Robert Zemeckis was attracted to the true-life story of Mark Hogancamp. Zemeckis’s brief since the Back to the Future series has been fantasy that comments on who we are right now, “we” being invariably Americans. Hogancamp, an illustrator who lives in upstate New York, was assaulted by a group of neo-Nazis who objected to his cross-dressing habits and left him with scars, brain damage, and severe PTSD, all of which ended his career and deprived him of much of his memory. In order to cope, he turned to dolls, and interpolated his struggle into a World War II action tale about him and a group of multi-cultural female commandos taking on German soldiers. He would set up tableaux with the dolls and then photograph them. These photos were recognized as pieces of art and Hogancamp became famous, though the fame only worked to exacerbate his psychological problems—or so Zemeckis’s movie would have you believe.
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David Lowery’s career so far has produced one of the weirdest bodies of work of any young director: the 70s pastiche Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, the surprisingly affecting family-friendly fantasy Pete’s Dragon, and the ambitious occult-psychological study A Ghost Story. His latest, clearly a vehicle for Robert Redford to leave the acting profession on his own terms, has almost nothing in common with those three previous films except casting: Redford appeared in Pete, and Casey Affleck, who plays a police detective here, was in both Saints and Ghost (the latter, however, mostly under a sheet).
Xavier Beauvois takes an unusual approach to a war movie. Though he opens on a battlefield strewn with corpses during World War I, his film very rarely addresses the brute terror of warfare. Like Satyajit Ray’s memorable Distant Thunder, it mostly looks at the effect war has on those who are not at war, in this case the French farmers who continued to till the land during and after World War I. Not surprisingly, these farmers tended to be women, since the men were either fighting or already killed, and the special attention that women bring to agriculture is emphasized through action, word, and sensibility.
Actor Paul Dano took on a lot when he decided to adapt Richard Ford’s 1990 novel as his directorial debut. Dano does not appear in the movie, and neither does his significant other and co-scenarist Zoe Kazan, but there’s something of the pair’s storied flair for the quirky and unexpected in both the story and the way they pull it off. Ford’s book takes place in the 1960s, in a backward backwater in Montana, where a family of three has relocated. The father, Jerry (Jake Gyllenhaal), is a golf pro who has given up competition to take a job at a local country club. The town is overshadowed by a mountain that seems to be constantly on fire, a situation that’s the source of a lot of local black humor. The mother, Jeanette (Carey Mulligan), is a housewife who, at first, seems resigned to her fate of constant motion for the sake of her husband’s ambitions, which only go as far as his pride. The teenage son, Joe (Ed Oxenbould), is, according to Jerry, destined to be a distinguished football player, though Joe is so unassuming that you can’t imagine him giving or receiving a tackle.
The movies are still conflicted when it comes to portraying LGBTQ individuals, not because the portraits are necessarily difficult to convey with sensitivity and honesty, but because the very act of representation is fraught. Heterosexual cisgender actors and actresses still mostly play the parts of gay, bi, and transgender individuals, and gay, bi, and transgender actors are justifiably upset, to say the least. The titular character in Lukas Dhont’s Girl, a young transgender woman trying to make it as a ballerina, is played by Victor Polster, a cisgender male, and while it’s not central to our appreciation of the movie’s merits to wonder if it might not have been better to have hired a nonbinary actor for the role, it’s difficult these days to dismiss the notion as you’re watching the movie, and that’s an unwanted and, for all intents and purposes, avoidable distraction.
According to Thomas Wolfe, you can’t go home again, but that doesn’t mean you can’t learn something in the attempt. I don’t know which country the 62-year-old Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski currently calls home—he left his native land for England when he was 14—but since returning to Poland to make films earlier this decade he has come into his own as a filmmaker with a cinematic style and narrative voice that are so distinctive he will soon have graduate seminars dedicated to his output. The movies he directed in the UK were accomplished and unremarkable, and it’s likely he started making movies in Poland—black-and-white “art films” in the old boxy aspect ratio—to rejigger his mojo in late middle age. Ida (2013), his first genuinely Polish film, won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and Cold War, his second, was nominated for the same award and probably would have won if Roma hadn’t been released the same year. Though Poland has produced some great directors and inspiring films, this pair by Pawlikowski already feel like the last word on the postwar cultural situation in Eastern Europe.
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