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IS BRIT SNIT OVER MEL'S 'PAT' RIGHT?
The New York Post, June 28, 2000
Just how historically accurate is Mel Gibson's Revolutionary War epic "The Patriot"?
Although it has not yet opened in Europe, it has drawn heavy fire in Britain for alleged inaccuracies, in particular for its many scenes featuring British atrocities that might not have happened.
Well-known historian Andrew Roberts called the film "racist" in the London Daily Express and some are calling for a boycott of both the movie and Sony-Columbia.
The Post invited two experts on the Revolutionary
War, Richard Snow, the historian, novelist and editor of
American Heritage, and Thomas Fleming, the author of several
books on the Revolution, to screen the
film and comment on its historic fidelity.
Both found differing degrees of fault with the
movie's depiction of the guerrilla war in South Carolina. Snow
agreed with much of the British criticism and felt the movie
was misleading in several important ways. He pointed out the
omission of the role of colonial loyalists, who would have
been the main real-life enemy of a South Carolina guerrilla like
Benjamin Martin, the fictional
rebel played by Gibson.
"John Adams famously said that about a third of the colonists were rebels, a third were loyal to the British Crown and a third were neutral... In South Carolina much of the fighting was between Americans - communities were set against each other and things could get pretty ugly,"Snow explained.
He agreed with outraged British critics that scenes where British redcoats are shown committing appalling atrocities against civilians and wounded prisoners distort the truth.
"You see British regulars ordered to execute
regular American troops who had been wounded," Snow said.
"That never happened. "Although the movie's called 'The
Patriot' it's not really a patriotic movie or about patriotism
at all. Everything is fueled by vengeance for the kind of
crimes the enemy didn't really commit. This was the most
political war - it was fought only about ideas, but the movie
takes
place in a total political vacuum ..."
"What's interesting about the Revolution is not how horrible the enemy was but how like us he was," Snow said. "It was in many ways a civil war."
Fleming, whose books on the period include "1776 - The Year of Illusions" and "Liberty" the companion volume to the PBS series on the Revolution, said, "The film's general historical accuracy is very good" - although he too found fault with some details.
He said the movie conveys "a very good picture of the savage civil war that raged in South Carolina in 1780" even though it underplays the important role of loyalist regiments and irregulars.
Fleming said he thinks the movie's atrocities, like the scene in which civilians are burned to death in a padlocked church, are legitimate poetic license that convey a sense of how brutal the war in South Carolina became.
"There was a lot of savagery, though most of it was done by small groups of marauding bands rather than regular troops who were kept under better discipline than that."