Butler's Cinema Scene

“PETERLOO” My rating: C

154 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

Mike Leigh’s “Peterloo” is less a film drama than it is an illustrated history lesson.

That’s a problem.

Leigh, who always has had a thing for life’s underdogs, here turns his attention to a notorious bit of British history. The 1819 massacre at St. Peter’s Field in Manchester, England, found His Majesty’s sword-waving cavalry riding into a crowd of peaceful demonstrators protesting for political reform.

The violence doesn’t rear its ugly head until late in this 2-hour, 33-minute effort.  Most of Leigh’s screenplay is devoted to eavesdropping on  a dozen or so characters who represent various attitudes and political viewpoints in the months before the bloody incident.

Thus we follow a shellshocked trumpeter from the Battle of Waterloo (David Moorst) who returns home to Manchester to find jobs are scare and respect for a former soldier nonexistent. We sit in on long, talky meetings in which various agitators rail against miserable working conditions, low pay, and  a political/economic system designed to grind the country’s have-nots into the ground while enriching the altready-haves.

(Karl Marx was only a year old at the time, but he undoubtedly grew up aware of the the Manchester massacre.)

We witness a mother and wife haggling over the price of a few eggs with which to feed her family. We observe men slaving in a steam-driven textile factory where one misstep can mean a crushed limb. And  journalists debating how to convey to the common reader what the government’s suspension of habeas corpus means to the individual.

Rory Kinnear

Roy Kenner appears as Henry Hunt, a wealthy businessman — and raging egotist — who nevertheless became a spokesman for reformist efforts. His fiery rhetoric was to be the centerpiece of the Peterloo meeting.

On the other side are the privileged few — imperious judges, MPs, bankers, the clergy, military men, government-paid spies and informants — even the pompous Prince Regent (Tim McInnerly) — who view any attempt to improve the working man’s lot as a violation of God’s will.

This isn’t the first time that Leigh, a master of the modern dramady, has turned to the 19th century.  His “Topsy-Turvy”explored the world of Gilbert & Sullivan, while “Mr. Turner” centered on famed painter J.M.W. Turner.

But in both of those cases Leigh delivered a more-or-less personal story.  “Peterloo,” by comparison, has a cast of dozens, with none of the characters holding down enough screen time to grab the audience’s sympathy.

The resulting film has been impeccably produced — as with “Mr. Turner” you feel you’re in a time machine capable of delivering the sounds, sights and even smells of a long-gone era.  But despite (or perhaps because of) the eloquence exhibited here by peer and peasant alike, “Peterloo” often feels forced, a film that talks at us instead of inviting us in.

| Robert W. Butler