Peterloo is overlong by about half an hour but director Mike Leigh’s customary passion drives it along despite the tedious exposition.
The story concerns a brutal military clampdown on a peaceful pro-democracy protest in Manchester, Britain’s first industrial city, in the lean years following the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, which resulted in hundreds of injuries and fifteen deaths.
Work is scarce and bread even more so, with the Corn Law tariffs restricting imports of food and grain.
The ordinary people are voiceless and restive. It’s the era of mass political meetings and agitation for political representation through the vote. Manchester was entirely unrepresented at the time at parliament in Westminster.
Some 50,000 people had arrived at St Peter's Fields on 16 August 1819 to hear radical speaker Henry Hunt campaign for parliamentary reform.
Terrified
Terrified of popular revolt, the local magistrate orders the Manchester Yeomanry to charge the crowd, with massive bloodshed the result.
The best part about Peterloo is the excellent character acting.
Mike Leigh resists any beautification of his characters and they are true to early 19thcentury life in a horny-handed and snaggle-toothed fashion.
There is no romanticising of the grim lot of the urban poor and the brutal factory life where they earned a scant living.
Mike Leigh recently told the Guardian that “there are loads of actors out there who are very good actors but they are thick. And none of them are ever in my films.”
He has chosen his cast with care and that keeps the viewer engaged.
News of the brutal military clampdown the film depicts reached a wider audience thanks to the power of the popular press, then entering its heyday.
Ironic
The reporters present dubbed the massacre Peterloo, an ironic reference to the Battle of Waterloo which happened four years previously.
And the events that day also led directly to the founding of the Manchester Guardian by a cotton merchant called John Edward Taylor who wrote an eye-witness account of the massacre. He wanted to see a new paper committed to political change and truthful reporting.