Movie Reviews P-Z

American Gladiator: The Patriot

There's a scene at the end of Unforgiven where Will Munny, Clint Eastwood's gnarled desperado, prepares to leave the town of Big Whiskey. Crouched inside the doors of the saloon where he has finally wrought the vengeance we've been expecting, he shouts hoarsely out into the dark street, "Alright, I'm comin' out. Any man I see out there, I'm gonna kill him. Any sonovabitch takes a shot at me, I'm not only gonna kill him, I'm gonna kill his wife, all his friends, and burn his damn house down!" It's a darkly comic moment in a frequently bleak film, as Munny's warning is both a bit of dramatic hyperbole and also a perfectly plausible threat, since he's just gunned down a half-dozen men inside Greely's Saloon. It's also a moment of acute generic self-consciousness, because the violence Munny threatens is so often not the conclusion but the beginning of the American Western, the tragic loss of family that traditionally drives a peace-loving settler into a career as a revenging gunslinger. (Think of the classic Stagecoach, in which John Wayne's Ringo Kid is an outlaw because he seeks vengeance against the killers of his father and brother.)

This narrative pattern, in Westerns and elsewhere (i.e., Hamlet) is often used to perform some ideological sleight-of-hand, displacing the source of violence onto some villain or villainous gang or villainous corporation and reassuring us that the essence of the heroic American lies not in his (rarely her) irresistible murderousness but rather in the capacity for a just and timely and meet revenge, in response to a series of insults and depredations that no civilized person could possibly endure. (One tribute to Unforgiven's toughness is the way it calls this neat binary into question by making its hero not just an outlaw but a paid assassin, and by the way it suggests that he can put his capacity for violence on and take it off like a suit of clothes--after exacting his revenge, Will Munny is rumored to have moved to San Francisco and prospered in dry goods.

The tenacity of this formula is very much evident in The Patriot, a Revolutionary War film with epic ambitions that asks the question, "Why did people fight for the cause of American independence," and answers it this way: "Because the cruel, heartless British killed their children, burned their houses down, took their workers hostage, and locked all their friends in the village church and then set it on fire." "This time, it's personal"--the standard formula of so many action films and sequels--is here transported back in time and used to evacuate from the War of Independence any hint of ideological motivation, and sense of politics, any suggestion that the war was fought over sovereignty or liberty or any of those Latinate words in the Declaration of Independence. Thanks to the exaggerated inhumanity of the enemy, patriotism in The Patriot is made to signify a kind of paternalism, the desire of a father to protect the lives of his children rather than their interests.

The father in question is Benjamin Martin (Mel Gibson), a well-to-do South Carolina widower with seven children to raise and a large plantation to oversee. His oldest son, Gabriel (Heath Ledger), is hot to join the colonial army when the story opens in 1776, but his father refuses to give his blessing to such an adventure--he himself is a celebrated veteran of the French and Indian War, deeply scarred by did and saw. In fact his old comrades-in-arms are seeking his support too, including Harry Burwell (Chris Cooper), now a colonel with the Colonials. But Martin is resolute, and skeptical of "the Cause"; during a meeting of the legislature he rejects the folly of trading "one tyrant three thousand miles away for three thousand tyrants" just a mile up the road. But of course this resistance has to be overcome, and thanks to spectacular acts of British malice it is, so that Martin's repressed talents and taste for violence and his skills at guerilla warfare can be put to the service of the new republic.

At least, that's the way it's supposed to look, but The Patriot can't seem to make up its mind about Martin's motives. His chief British antagonist, Colonel Tavington (Jason Isaacs), keeps targeting Martin's friends and family throughout the film, as if he (or the filmmakers) feared that Martin's motivation might ebb or that he might at some point conclude that he'd achieved enough revenge. But after a final showdown with Tavington at a battle designed to resemble the Battle of Cowpens in January 1781, the film proceeds to reassure us that Martin has taken up "the Cause" by showing him still in service at Yorktown nine months later, to witness the laboriously anticlimactic surrender of Cornwallis. (another way to characterize The Patriot would be to say that it's one of those historical epics that can't not show us Yorktown, can't stand the idea of not showing us that too--as if we might not think the war had ended yet without the sight of that white flag.)

Ultimately Martin is the perfect patriot not for colonial times, but for our time. The French and Indian War was evidently his Vietnam ("Indian country!"), during which he witnessed and engaged in the kinds of massacres and atrocities he's understandably reluctant to talk about (one of which involved a bucket of human tongues and eyeballs sent as a message by Martin's troops). For him (and for us) the Revolution has the potential to be the Good War, a cleansing battle with a vicious enemy onto whom his past sins can be projected, and a battle in which that projection can be obscured by our astonishment at that enemy's viciousness. Where could they have learned such cruelty?

Moreover is distrustful of government in a cheerful, Contract-with-America sort of way; his "three thousand tyrants" remark gets a big chuckle from the viewing audience, despite the fact that it is at heart an antidemocratic statement. But of course Martin isn't a democrat, and doesn't live in a democracy; he's a wealthy landowner who has foremost in his mind the welfare of his family and his estate. "I'm a parent--I haven't got the luxury of principles," he says, and his patrician comforts and substantial holdings make him easy for the average suburban audience to identify with in our robust economy, with its gated communities. His closest onscreen relative nowadays is probably the general-turned-gladiator Maximus in Ridley Scott's Gladiator, another apolitical military man whose heart's desire is really to be back home at the villa with his wife and child--who are of course cruelly murdered (and the villa burned) to provide him with the timeless impetus for revenge. (In fact the role of Maximus, played by Russell Crowe, was originally offered to Mel Gibson).

This explicit linkage of a prodigious capacity for violence, a contempt for politics, and a nostalgic desire for domestic comforts apparently represents the cinematic sum-total of the American way of life at the end of the millennium, and of course it is the duty of films like The Patriot to weave these threads into a comforting if garish tapestry--or rather, flag; the repair of a torn American battle flag is a motif itself woven unsubtly into The Patriot, and our hearts are meant to swell when Martin, having come to a crisis about his participation in the war, rides out to join the troops for the climactic battle with the streaming banner in his hands.

There are some pluses in The Patriot; it is directed by Roland Emmerich, after all, who knows how to stage a scene of action crisply. The late eighteenth century was, of course, the Age of Moronic Warfare, in which rank upon rank of soldiers would line up about fifteen yards apart and blaze away at one another with their muskets until somebody broke and ran; Emmerich offers us a couple of these gruesome set-pieces in addition to the guerrilla action of Martin and his band (and there's nothing like guerrilla warfare for a good montage or two). One memorable shot lets you see what a cannonball looks like just before it takes your head off. At the same time there's mercifully little of the star-torture that we've come to expect from Gibson, who was electrocuted in Lethal Weapon, was drawn and quartered in Braveheart, and had his toes broken by a hammer in Payback (to name a few). It's mostly emotional torture he goes through here. And finally the cinematography produces a gorgeous Colonial South, in both its pre-war autumnal abundance and in the vividly colorful battles.

Overall, though, The Patriot is a pretty easy film to complain about, and invites disparagement from many quarters. Spike Lee has already sounded off about the film's dishonest representation of slavery: though the opening image is of a young black boy picking corn on Martin's plantation (note that word), we're quickly given to understand that all the African-Americans on his property are free blacks (doubtless working there because of his excellent health plan)--a strange kind of neocon political correctness. Feminists might object to the overpoweringly patriarchal picture The Patriot (note the etymology) gives of America's origins; Martin is a founding father who seems at first to have reproduced by parthenogenesis, with seven children and no wife, though soon enough we see him visiting his wife's grave (further evidence of Hollywood's deromanticization of matrimony-- only dead wives can inspire devotion). Eventually he takes up with his wife's sister Charlotte (Joely Richardson), who makes googly-eyes at him for three-quarters of the film before overcoming his obtuseness; in the last scene of the film we see that they have a new child, which nicely and subtly casts the shadow of incest over the founding of the nation. And finally, the British are up in arms--figuratively--over the way that the King's troops are depicted in the film: on the one hand is Lord Cornwallis (Tom Wilkinson), so impotent he can't even keep the loyalty of his dogs, while on the other we have the sneering, sadistic Tavington, who eats babies for breakfast. Tavington's character is based on the historical Banastre Tarleton, commander of a mounted Tory Legion renowned for its savagery, just as Gibson's Martin is in part based on the Carolina guerrilla leader Francis Marion, the "Swamp Fox," and evidently the British are still smarting over losing that war. But historically at least "Bloody Tarleton" may have had the last laugh. He was only in his twenties during the Revolutionary period, and afterward he returned to England, where he became an MP and eventually a general, was knighted, and died in 1833. Apparently he just put off his battlefield brutality like a suit of clothes.