Peterloo as a bit different than I expected. I haven't seen a Mike Leigh movie before. Perhaps that could've better prepared me. This is a chatty movie. It's 2h30m long, and the first 2 hours is just different groups of people in different rooms having long talks, prone to breaking into monologues. I'm not sure what I expected from the movie, but this wasn't it. Leigh spends an endless amount of time foregrounding the assorted political discussions of the day. I get the sense that historical accuracy is important to him, so everyone and everything looks appropriately dressed for that time period. Although, it still looked like a lot of the actors were playing dress up. Those two hours had me begging for more plot and less ideas.
The last half hour is the Peterloo Massacre. It's somehow both sensational and mundane. The actual Peterloo Massacre had 60,000 people in attendance. Leigh had hundreds of extras but still had to shoot everything strategically to mask the numbers. The massacre was both understated and exaggerated. It happens without a score or point of view. Leigh does a good job of capturing the carnage and confusion of the situation. I needed a bit more grounding though. I only barely understood how it escalated in that way or what the British Cavalry were even trying to do (Did they want the people to disperse? Were they trying to arrest them? Was the goal to maim them? Did different groups have different instructions?). Frankly, the mounted soldiers looked kind of silly swinging their swords haphazardly at people below. Maybe it's because no one looks right in that motion or because those actors didn't look comfortable swinging a sword. I think a lot of it was the fact that much of the time, the people they were swinging swords at weren't recoiling as much as I'd expect them to.
Peterloo feels oddly bound by historical record. Mayhem isn't as cinematic as you'd think. It happens more in short bursts than in 20 minutes climactic scenes. The number of deaths at Peterloo is disputed but generally estimated around 15. In terms of cinematic mayhem, that's hard to stretch out. The film virtually checks off each death to make sure it gets all the carnage it can without being accused of exaggerating it.
I'm afraid I'm not doing a good job of making that last point. Let's try this instead. How many people died at the St. Valentine's Day Massacre? My first guess was at least a dozen. The actual answer is 7. That's a lot, but when you think about gangster movies, 7 is the body count in an opening chase scene, not a massacre. Similarly, the 15 dead in Peterloo is tragic in actuality but seems tame when put into a movie.
Finally, Peterloo felt a lot like working-class idealism porn. The members of the land-owning aristocracy were comically overplayed. I kept expecting them to have boils on their skin by the end, just to make it extra clear that they're bad people. I'm not saying that I need to be rooting for them at all, but it clashes with the rest of the movie. Everything else in the movie is striving for realism. Having mustache-twirling villains undercuts that. I would've preferred it if the movie had cut their perspective out entirely. It would've been more thematically fitting; the poor people being so ignored that the movie doesn't even let us see what the aristocracy thinks.
Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend
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