On TV: "Peterloo"

It's now clear that Mike Leigh's Peterloo hasn't quite caught the public's imagination in the same way its predecessor, 2014's Mr. Turner, did. There would appear to be several reasons for this. Rather than a national-treasure performer playing a national-treasure artist painting vibrant London sunsets, Peterloo promises a lesser-known ensemble (toplined by Maxine Peake beneath a Vermeer bonnet) in a reconstruction of a little-known corner of British history - the 1819 massacre of peaceful protestors at a rally in Manchester - which resulted in a crushing defeat for the working classes. In its efforts to discuss the causes and ramifications of this under-discussed episode, the new film gets wordier and wordier with each scene; instead of Mr. Turner's pretty pictures, it commits to the dourness of pre-electrification Northern life in exactly the same way Leigh's tough Vera Drake committed to the dourness of the East End slums; and after two-and-a-half hours, it concludes with a downer ending that confirms the pessimist's view of history as, more often than not, a terrible slap in the face. I wondered whether any of the suits involved passed Leigh a note to inquire whether he couldn't in some way lighten matters up a touch, and then of course realised the famously ornery director wouldn't have paid them the blindest bit of notice anyway.

There may be something honourable in such intransigence, and there are still elements to admire here, notably in the film's evident scholarship, its management of scale and its historical veracity. From just a few minutes of onscreen activity, we can infer the performers had immersive training in how to best use the looms, angle grinders and printing presses by which the film evokes 19th century labour practices, and that Peake may very well have slept with the period potato peeler she's seen wielding at one point. Leigh has used Amazon money to purge from the frame anything that might scan as distractingly modern, and thereby recreate a dark age - one that, in the bright light of our touchscreen era, feels closer to feudalism than it does to the present - in which the fate of the British working classes was arguably sealed. (No nation-spanning French Revolution for us; instead, the protestors were driven into retreat, told to know their place, keep calm and carry on kowtowing. Or else.) There is, however, plenty of evidence to suggest that Leigh has become increasingly self-conscious in his efforts to (re)make history. The idiosyncratic choices of this director's previous period dramas (which include Drake, Turner and - best of all - 1999's Topsy Turvy) - arrived at spontaneously, either in workshop or on the day of filming - seem themselves to have been purged, and what's left behind betrays a familiar weakness of long-held passion projects: everything appears nailed in place, fussed over, vaguely lacquered. So much energy has been funnelled into Peterloo's recreation of life as it once was that actual life has been micromanaged out of it.

This is also, I think, a very specific take on history, which isn't always to the film's favour, as those early reviews questioning the simplicity of Peterloo's politics have flagged up. Leigh remains capable of dramatic subtleties and grace notes: I warmed to one workers' meeting, where an extremist young longhair can be heard screaming for the King's head, while centrist dad avant-l'heure Philip Jackson tries to avoid throwing the baby out with the bathwater. And the director's pre-existing commitment to the collective takes on a new edge in this context: Rory Kinnear's Henry Hunt, parachuted in from London in what other movies would doubtless position as the white-saviour role, is here defined as a snippy, metropolitan-elite snob who goes missing when the going gets tough, and doesn't even merit an epitaph in Leigh's eyes. (Peake, too, occupies no more than a supporting role; the varyingly unruly mob's the real star.) Yet Leigh's depiction of the ruling classes is forever more cartoonish than chilling, and these caricatures only add to the sense of an overly declamatory drama, wall-to-wall with wobbly-jowled, tophatted speechifying in which the same handful of sticking points are hammered to death. Long stretches of Peterloo would serve as unimpeachable civics lessons - they're like the twenty-minute collectivism scene that stopped Ken Loach's Land and Freedom dead in its tracks - but they're far less effective as drama or cinema than they are as a demonstration of oratorical technique.

What's missing from these scenes is any resonant debate - the debate Leigh set up very simply in a film like 2008's Happy-Go-Lucky by putting two individuals with radically different perspectives (there, Sally Hawkins' indelible Poppy and Eddie Marsan as her equally unforgettable driving instructor) in the same confined space. Peterloo is too grandiose for that, keeping its two tribes at arm's length for most of its duration, and busying itself with waffling that puts its conflict off - and off, and off again - until everything explodes at Peterloo in what the BBFC, somewhat deflatingly, describes as "moderate violence". The film's second half proves markedly stronger, with its poignant what-ifs, its glimpses of the victory that looked to have been within its huddled masses' grasp before the descent into pitched battle. You feel Leigh wants both the film and the massacre to serve as a rallying cry - an opportunity to learn from history, and improve on past results - yet on a scene-by-scene basis Peterloo treats that history as a done deal, rather than an ongoing struggle. Its box-office thud feels emblematic of a moment where the British Left, no less caught up in windy, angry, exhausting self-analysis, seems itself on the brink of defeat, while the working classes they once vowed to protect are being led towards the void by a new generation of oddbod toffs and poshos. "Liberty or death!," cry Leigh's rebels, shortly before setting off on what would, for some of them, be a fateful last march. To battle-scarred, experience-burnt 2018 ears, that might sound like another dangerously binary choice.

(December 2018)

Peterloo screens on Channel 4 at 11.55pm tomorrow.