The big question about Andrew Garfield’s new film The Uprising has been: Is it secretly a Robin Hood origin story?
The answer, it turns out, is… maybe?
Playing its cards close to the vest so it can be read as either a prequel to the English hero’s classical tale or a straightforward historical action-adventure about a group of citizens who’re mad as hell and not going to take it anymore, director Paul Greengrass’ film (September 11, in theaters) is, in this regard, quite coy.
Otherwise, though, it’s a drab and monotonous affair that stomps, trots, and rolls around in the mud and muck for two tiresome hours. With two-time Oscar nominee Garfield delivering a one-note performance that’s in line with the rest of the repetitive proceedings, this dud—whether a riff on the iconic outlaw or merely a stand-alone period piece—is legendary only in its tediousness.
In the English countryside circa 1381, a solitary individual spends his days and nights mourning the death of his family (to the plague) and plowing his fields—a vocation that’s earned him the name “Ploughman” (Garfield). His is a sad and solitary life, yet it becomes considerably more interesting when he learns that the royal council that counsels sniveling young King Richard II (Woody Norman) has decided to make up for the crown’s fiscal deficit by raising taxes on the populace.
Since the common people already have virtually nothing, this is a bridge too far, and when Ploughman resists—not only the levies, but also soldiers’ mistreatment of young girls—he unwittingly incites a rebellion.
In the blink of an eye, half the peasant class rises up in opposition to what it sees as unfair governance. This ire is most squarely directed at the council, whose members, including Treasurer Hales (Tom Hallander) and Archbishop Sudbury (Stephen Dillane), are depicted as villainously conniving caricatures.
Joining Ploughman’s cause are “heretic” priest John Ball (Jamie Bell) and soldier Wat Tyler (Shōgun star Cosmo Jarvis), who are convinced that the monarch is being controlled by his “traitor” advisors and must be freed from their grasp. Their plan is to gather additional supporters on their march to London, where their voices can be heard.
Opening under cloudy skies, The Uprising’s visuals are awash in grays and browns that lend it a grim (if not outright funereal) pall. Vibrant it most certainly is not. It is, however, preternaturally busy, since, as is his trademark, the director employs unsteady handheld cinematography for the proceedings’ entirety.
Except for a few CGI flyovers of London and the surrounding pastoral lands, there isn’t a single fully static composition in the film. The fact that his camera bounces and whips about regardless of the material at hand—it totters when people are sitting at tables or racing through battlefields—means that, even when it is warranted, his approach is simply empty affection, utilized without rhyme, reason, or restraint.
Just as Greengrass’ aesthetics are perpetually bumpy, so too are his cast’s performances incessantly droning. Garfield’s Ploughman sports the same anguished-yet-determined expression for the duration of his quest, and Bell does little more than passionately scream about his cause to anyone who’ll listen. In a supporting role as Ploughman’s comrade and potential love interest Alyce, Thomasin McKenzie (Jojo Rabbit) is likewise featureless, there to tease romantic sparks and to share a late heart-to-heart with the protagonist that inspires him to continue onward.
Dressed in dirty garments and boasting scraggly beards and unkempt hair, the film’s characters are a dingy and dull bunch, and for all their blather about tactics and goals, their undertaking is a slog through a series of indistinguishable pastures and forests.
When not depicting Ploughman’s efforts to keep his conscripts focused on their task—which, it eventually becomes clear, is attaining freedom for everyone as well as punishment for the council’s evildoers—The Uprising trains its attention on King Richard II, who suffers from night terrors which paralyze him to the point of ineffectualness.
Norman’s turn as the ruler is assured insofar as it makes Richard an insufferable brat, and in her few scenes as Richard’s mother, Katherine Waterston looks gravely concerned. Yet they’re just as wearying as everything else about this venture, whose narrative plods along from one ho-hum incident to another.
Upon reaching London, Ploughman and his rebel mates convince King Richard II—whose army is not presently available, much to his chagrin—to meet with them. It’s abundantly obvious, however, that the sovereign is an untrustworthy tyrant who’s never going to comply with their demands, and that’s before they begin talking about self-rule.
With no surprises up its sleeve, The Uprising goes through its preordained motions, with King Richard convincing the agitators that he has an open mind and then, well, doing what a typical Robin Hood villain would do. All of which then leads to a one-year-later coda in which Garfield and his not-very-merry band of bandits demonstrate that they’re now fearsome forest-dwelling revolutionaries committed to fighting despotism with blades and arrows.
Taken as a generic portrait of the hoi polloi protesting injustice perpetrated by the powers-that-be, The Uprising is nondescript and uninvolving, its tone as flat as its imagery. Viewing it as the first chapter of the Robin Hood myth, though, makes it come off even worse.
Devoid of swashbuckling excitement, colorful personality, and the hero’s trademark flair, it’s a “serious” retelling of a familiar tale that—like Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood from 2010 and Michael Sarnoski’s The Death of Robin Hood from earlier this summer—lacks its source material’s vibrant spirit.
Greengrass has throughout his career drenched his films in a verité sheen, and while that’s been apt in a few true-story cases (Bloody Sunday, United 93, The Lost Bus), it’s an ill-fitting style for The Uprising, which—regardless of its real-life roots—plays as a prolonged game of dress-up.
Drowning Garfield and Bell’s charisma beneath a tidal wave of filth and grime, orchestrating drama in the darkest and most predictable manner possible, and staging not a single original or invigorated centerpiece, it’s the worst of all worlds, and less the beginning of an unforgettable fable than the end of the director getting mileage out of his shaky-cam gimmickry.
