Peterloo

A slice of history in the hands of a master

Mike Leigh brings his mastery of filmmaking to a massacre that happened in Manchester, England, in 1819.

The movie opens with the image of a lost, bewildered bugle boy in the aftermath of the battle of Waterloo. We follow him as he walks all the way home to Manchester. At the end of the movie, Leigh will return to a parallel landscape of desolation, and to this lad, like many young men, cannon fodder to the whims of politicians.

In Peterloo, the people are tired of those whims and they want their voices heard. But the rulers seem to have all the words, be it members of parliament, or provincial magistrates. Language is used by the powerful to lord over the people with contemptuous oratorical flourishes, but it is also used by reformers to impassion the hearts of the disenfranchised to demand change.

That Leigh is able to make a historical epic fresh, alive, and somehow intimate is a testament to his fabled way of making movies, which involves 6 months of rehearsal as he and the actors come up with the script together. The result is that, by the time of the shoot, all the characters are so lived in, they feel like real, dimensional people. I wonder how he and his cast arrived at language of such extraordinary richness and specificity through this collaborative, improvisational process.