The wind reaches the fens of eastern England before the light does, moving over the marshes in long gray sweeps. Andrew Garfield, muddied and short of breath, labors through it: a farmer with his ox, cutting furrows into the land. His character, Ploughman, is a man who refers to himself simply by what he does.
Grief has pared him down to labor and memory. The plague took his wife and children, and all that remains is a hut, the animal that shares it through the winter for warmth, and the daily toll of survival. It’s slow and thankless work, the kind a kingdom takes for granted as readily as the earth beneath its feet.
That lone farmer anchors Paul Greengrass’ new film The Uprising, in theaters Sept. 11. Written and directed by Greengrass, the filmmaker’s deepest reach into the past yet dramatizes the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, when tens of thousands of English commoners, taxed past endurance in the long shadow of the Black Death, marched on London to demand a fairer world. Around Garfield, Greengrass assembled a cast that includes Jamie Bell as the rebel priest John Ball, Cosmo Jarvis as the revolt’s military leader Wat Tyler, Thomasin McKenzie as Alyce, a fictional follower of Ball, Woody Norman as the boy king Richard II, and Katherine Waterston as the Countess, Richard II’s mother.
The film follows its hero from fens to road and road to London, then London toward the forest—as private grief grows into collective fury and fury reaches the gates of power. Beneath the armor and beyond the crowds, Greengrass’ epic hinges on the moment when people long treated as expendable begin to act on their claim to dignity and agency. Greengrass invented Ploughman for the film, but the forces pressing in on him are no invention.
The director opted not to build The Uprising around one of the revolt’s historical figures, such as Tyler or Ball. They were all ordinary farmers, ordinary people who lived in villages and small towns, who’d had enough.” That decision turns a vast uprising into the story of one man whose loss forces him to confront the larger indignities of the world that remains. Garfield recognized that feeling across centuries.
How do we fight for our right to live a life of freedom and of dignity, and of connection?” The Black Death reached England in the summer of 1348, most likely aboard ships that came into the Dorset port of Melcombe. Moving through the country at an estimated one to five miles a day, it reached London by November and, within two years, killed as much as half of England’s population. In its wake, whole villages were left empty.
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