director
Roland
Emmerich
screenwriter
Robert
Rodat
producers
Dean Devlin
Mark Gordon
Gary Levinsohn
cinematographer
Caleb Deschanel
music
John Williams
editors
David Brenner
Julie Monroe
cast
Mel Gibson (Benjamin Martin)
Heath Ledger (Gabriel Martin)
Joely Richardson (Charlotte)
Jason Isaacs (Tavington)
Chris Cooper (Burwell)
Tchéky Karyo (Villeneuve)
Rene Auberjonois (Reverend Oliver)
Lisa Brenner (Anne)
Tom Wilkinson (Cornwallis)
Donal Logue (Dan Scott)
Adam Baldwin (Wilkins)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 164m
u.s.
release: June 28, 2000
video
availability: VHS -
DVD
official
website
other roland
emmerich films
reviewed on this website:
- the
day after tomorrow
- godzilla
- independence
day
- stargate
|
Not
much screen time passes before The Patriot gives up any
pretense of being a serious historical epic. Mel Gibson, as the
anguished 18th-century hero Benjamin Martin, has just lost one
young son and is in danger of losing another -- his eldest, Gabriel
(Heath Ledger), held at knifepoint by a craven Redcoat. What
does Mel do? He lifts up his heavy Cherokee hatchet and hurls
it into the Brit's forehead. Whack! The audience goes
whoo! The movie is rabble-rousing at its hypocritical
worst; it asks us to respect Benjamin's longing for peace but
also cues us to cheer whenever he sticks it to a British soldier
and breaks it off.
The Patriot is too gaga for thinking adults and too long
and excessively gory (at one point, Benjamin is soaked with blood
from head to toe) for kids, so one must assume it has been made
for simple-minded adults -- many of whom will respond as expected
(or as programmed) to the film as a ripping yarn about a burly
manly man who revenges himself upon sadistic aristocratic fascists,
as if we hadn't just seen that in Gladiator
and in Gibson's own Braveheart.
Gibson seems to love movies in which his heroes are outrageously
fucked over, tortured, robbed of their loved ones (well, at least
here we're spared the usual Gibson torture scene), thus giving
them full moral license to wreak vicious havoc on their enemies.
Either this is commercial shrewdness on Gibson's part -- hey,
it worked in Mad Max -- or a troubling psychological glitch
that drives him to play rabid martyrs.
To be sure, Gibson does vengeance better than Charles Bronson
ever did. An intense actor oddly gaining more edge as he gets
older and more vulnerable, Gibson has some fine moments here
when he almost comes unglued in the face of loss -- and then,
finally, does come apart. Benjamin faces a lot of loss in The
Patriot; at the outset of the American Revolution, he predicts
that innocents will die, and it's a good call. Whenever the movie
begins to bog down, director Roland Emmerich and screenwriter
Robert Rodat (Saving
Private Ryan) toss in another tragedy so that Gibson
can get his bloodlust up again.
The British press has been unkind to the movie, understandably:
The English are represented by either clueless aristocracy (Tom
Wilkinson's General Cornwallis) or mustache-twirling sadism (Jason
Isaac's Colonel Tavington, who makes up for having no mustache
to twirl by reading his lines as if they were maggots in his
mouth). We also see one American Loyalist captain (Adam Baldwin),
who, following orders from Tavington, has his men torch a church
full of innocents. This is an intriguing character who could
have been a complex doppelganger for Benjamin, but this scene
and a couple of other brief appearances are all we ever see of
him, and though he looks conflicted and disgusted as the church
burns, there's no follow-up -- he gets neither a come-uppance
nor a moral-reawakening scene.
As in Braveheart, most of the supporting characters are
there to fight alongside Mel Gibson -- solid actors like Chris
Cooper and Rene Auberjonois are thrown away -- and the leading
lady (Joely Richardson), apparently in the movie to prove that
Benjamin is heterosexual (as if his seven children left any doubt),
never makes an impression except to deliver the movie's much-derided
line, "It's a free country, or at least it will be."
I didn't expect complexity from the director who made Independence
Day and Godzilla,
but The Patriot is American History for Dummies -- the
birth of a nation treated as a backdrop for vengeful bloodletting.
Now that Mel Gibson has saved his people from the scummy English
twice already, could he please move on? If a movie star from
another country consistently made films depicting Americans as
sadistic wimps, would we be any happier about it than the British
press is? |
