“The Uprising” Keeps Its Hands Too Clean

One of the earliest scenes in Paul Greengrass’s The Uprising is a tax collection where we meet poor villagers in the Essex marshes standing in line before a table at a tithe barn. The plague left them with nothing and killed some of the people the crown now wants money from. If that wasn’t bad enough, the guards begin lifting young women’s skirts and reaching between their legs to decide if they are old enough to pay.

Andrew Garfield’s farmer steps in and beats one of the gropers to death. Within days, the law arrives demanding to arrest the attacker, or else others would be held accountable for what he did. The anonymous farmer, known only in the film as Ploughman, turns himself in. “I struck a man to protect a child. I’ll pay for it.” As they prepare to hang him, a band of villagers ambushes the chief justice’s escort, and Greengrass stages it with the speed and confusion he does better than anyone.

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Giancarlo Sopo

Giancarlo Sopo is a writer exploring cinema, politics, and the conservative imagination.

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One of the earliest scenes in Paul Greengrass’s The Uprising is a tax collection where we meet poor villagers in the Essex marshes standing in line before a table at a tithe barn. The plague left them with nothing and killed some of the people the crown now wants money from. If that wasn’t bad enough, the guards begin lifting young women’s skirts and reaching between their legs to decide if they are old enough to pay.

Andrew Garfield’s farmer steps in and beats one of the gropers to death. Within days, the law arrives demanding to arrest the attacker, or else others would be held accountable for what he did. The anonymous farmer, known only in the film as Ploughman, turns himself in. “I struck a man to protect a child. I’ll pay for it.” As they prepare to hang him, a band of villagers ambushes the chief justice’s escort, and Greengrass stages it with the speed and confusion he does better than anyone.