Fahrenheit 11/9 is Moore at his fiery polemic best, from its opening sequence when its asks “How the F**k did this happen?” it grabs you by the throat and seldom lets go till the final credits roll. Those looking to Moore to simply eviscerate the incumbent President will however be disappointed as he parks his tanks firmly on the lawn of the elite’s who paved his way to White House, the most damming sequence being reserved for his predecessors visit to Flint to ‘sample’ the water.
Mike Leigh’s Petertloo is also a story of the peoples’ struggle against corrupt and mendacious elites. It presents a crowded canvas heavy with exposition, occasionally clunky as with explanation of the suspension habeas corpus, where characters battle for our attention. A tighter edit may have produced a shorter film but would have lost the pastoral scenes, that evoke simpler, better times and provide much needed relief to the rhetoric that drives it. While occasionally slipping into caricature, (Tim McInnerny channelling Blackadder as Prince Regent, Vincent Franklin’s pantomime villain Magistrate Rev Etlhelson and Tom Gill’s Mr Johnson having a whiff of Father Ted’s Dougal about him) the understated brutality of the massacre itself is one of the highlights of Leigh’s career.
A lesser director would have finished it there, with a glib statement about the human cost of Peterloo and the resulting reforms that flowed from it in the decades that followed in a panel or two of text as the credits roll, but Leigh offers no such comfort. The metropolitan elite resume business as usual and the film closes with Joseph’s bleak rain swept funeral.
While nearly 200 years may separate there character’s and events the underlying message of both films is clear, politics belongs to the people, not the élites.