When he was offered the lead role in
Gladiator, Mel Gibson declined on the basis
that he was too old. He wasn’t
too old, though, to take the lead role in
The Patriot, in which he gets to save the
American revolution almost single-
handedly.
Gibson, who seems to be set on becoming
John Wayne, plays Benjamin Martin, a
farmer, widower and
affectionate father of seven children, who
is initially opposed to the war with
England. The affectionate-father
stuff is established early, in scenes of
mawkish humour and equally mawkish
sentimentality. His pacifism comes a
little later, when he makes a solemn speech
about how awful war is. It is equally
sentimental, and rings not a little
hollow coming from an actor whose
iconography is steeped in the gleeful
violence of the Lethal Weapon quartet.
Besides, we know from the trailer – and the
whole set-up of the movie – that soon he’s
going to be battling with
the best of them, so we can’t take his
sententious pronouncements about raising
his brood in peace very seriously.
But this is just a way of justifying the
violence to follow, of making Mel-Ben seem
ever so righteous when
he starts a guerrilla war against the
enemy. A wicked British commander (played
with some relish by Jason
Isaacs) flouts the gentlemanly rules of
warfare, soon perpetrating horrid crimes
against Ben’s brood. And
when Ben’s family is under threat, well,
then he has to get out his old Indian
hatchet and go to war. In the
great American-movie moral scheme,
threatening one’s family is about the worst
thing anyone can do, and a
ferocious response is justified – nay, it
is required.
Ben’s self-defence, naturally, takes the
form of offence. And offensiveness. There
have already been outcries in
the United States and Britain at the
historical inaccuracies of The Patriot. The
atrocities committed by the redcoats,
reminiscent of Nazi acts, are entirely
ahistorical: as one American historian has
pointed out, such terrible deeds
might well have caused enough rancour to
keep the US out of World War I.
Then there’s the real man on whom Benjamin
Martin is based: Francis Marion, the “Swamp
Fox” whose irregulars
mercilessly harried the British, also
hunted Cherokee Indians as if they were
game (remember the Bushmen in
Southern Africa?) and was given to the
serial rape of his slaves. In the movie,
Ben has a nasty wartime secret in his
past, but this South Carolina plantation-
owner has no slaves. Instead, the black
people working his land find him a
model employer. This at a time when even
the drafters of the American Constitution
were slave-owners.
Such distortions might be forgiveable if
The Patriot weren’t so concerned to make us
believe it has history
on its side. From the title on (and it
opened in the US in the July 4 holiday
week), it makes knee-jerk
nationalism part of its marketing campaign.
Those evil Brits! Those heroic Americans!
The movie is going
as a serious historical epic when it is
really an overblown action picture waving a
few ragged flags.
Consequently, the deaths of key figures
don’t play as tragedy but as gratuitous
emotional string-pulling. Mel, of
course, survives everything (and Mel stays
Mel throughout; he never really becomes
Ben). God forbid the action
hero should meet a sticky end, even if he
and his mangy wig are well past their sell-
by dates.
Gibson was clearly trying to do another
Braveheart, which won him Oscars for best
picture and best director in
1995. The Patriot would probably have been
better had Gibson directed it himself.
Instead, it is overseen by
Roland Emmerich of Godzilla fame (“Size
does matter”), and his hand is heavy: the
cinematography is honeyed
and the ever-present surging music contains
a large string section to direct our
feelings.
That said, The Patriot is not unenjoyable.
The action is often rousing, with some
impressive battles, though
nothing in the film’s latter half really
tops Mel’s first go at the devilish Poms.
Heath Ledger (who was so
charming in the teen comedy 10 Things I
Hate About You) does well as his ardent
firstborn, and the nearly
three hours of the movie’s running-time
pass relatively smoothly. It’s just that if
you want to do justice to
history, and if you aspire to more than
mindless entertainment, smoothness isn’t
enough. You need a bit of
true grit.