The Uprising Review: Greengrass Takes on 1381

England, 1377 and onward. War with France has drained the treasury, plague has hollowed out whole villages, and the poll tax falls heaviest on those with the least. Garfield plays a ploughman whose name matters less than his circumstance: a widower scraping a living from land he will never own, ground down by tithes, labor laws, and the casual cruelty of his betters. When he witnesses a neighbor's family destroyed by tax collectors, something in him snaps - not into heroism, exactly, but into refusal.

He falls in with John Ball (Jamie Bell), the itinerant preacher whose sermons on equality have already made him dangerous to the crown, and soon with Wat Tyler (Cosmo Jarvis), a veteran of the French wars whose military experience gives the growing mob teeth. What begins as scattered local resistance swells into a march on London, forcing Simon Sudbury (Stephen Dillane), Sir Robert Hales (Tom Hollander), and the young king Richard II (Woody Norman) to confront an army drawn from the fields they have always treated as property. Thomasin McKenzie's Alyce, a peasant woman navigating her own precarious survival, provides the film's emotional counterweight to the speechifying.

Greengrass opens in close, and rarely pulls back. The camera stays at eye level in the fields, on the roads, inside the crush of bodies pressing toward the capital. You feel the cold, the hunger, the wet straw. It is a deliberate rejection of the heritage-film grammar of sweeping estates and candlelit courts, and it works - this is a medieval England that smells of rot and rain rather than prestige television.

Garfield is the film's engine. He underplays early, letting small humiliations accumulate behind his eyes, so that by the time he speaks in front of a crowd, the transformation reads as earned rather than dramatic convenience. Bell's Ball is more theatrical, all fire and rhetoric, and the contrast between the two men keeps the politics personal. Jarvis brings a coiled, soldierly menace to Wat Tyler that complicates the movement's moral clarity; this is not a tidy band of saints. Hollander and Dillane are suitably reptilian as the establishment's enforcers, though both are underwritten - the film has little interest in understanding power from the inside, which is a choice with costs.

The screenplay, by turns spare and over-explanatory, is the weak link. Greengrass and his writers understand the texture of oppression instinctively but struggle to dramatize the ideological debates that gave the revolt its shape. Ball's famous question about what the nobles ever did to deserve their station lands with force; other exchanges feel like a lecture delivered through a helmet. The pacing also sags in the middle stretch, where the march becomes a series of similar confrontations before the final act's inevitable collision.

Still, when The Uprising commits to chaos - the storming of the Tower, the panic in the streets, the queasy sense that a mob is both righteous and uncontrollable - it is genuinely gripping. Greengrass has not lost his instinct for the way violence escalates in real time, and he refuses the easy catharsis of a triumphant ending. History did not reward these people. The film knows it, and it stings.

Pros

• Andrew Garfield's restrained, deeply felt lead performance
• Greengrass's immersive, ground-level staging of medieval life
• Cosmo Jarvis and Jamie Bell bring genuine complexity to the movement's leaders
• Visceral, well-choreographed crowd and battle sequences
• Refuses sentimental resolution in favor of honest historical bitterness

Cons

• Uneven screenplay that explains too much and dramatizes too little
• Antagonists are thin, reducing the conflict to villains versus victims
• Middle act loses momentum and repetition sets in
• 128 minutes could be tightened by fifteen without losing anything essential

The Uprising is not the definitive Peasants' Revolt film - the script isn't sharp enough for that - but it is a fiercely acted, physically transporting one. Greengrass treats 1381 as a living argument about who gets to be heard, and Garfield gives that argument a face. See it for the performances and the craft; forgive it the lectures. A solid, sobering 7 out of 10.