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Also in this section:
He's A Rebel
The New York Post, June 28, 2000
by Jonathan Foreman
'The Patriot" was directed by Roland Emmerich, the German director of "Independence Day" and "Godzilla."
While the film contains some terrific, realistically bloody battle scenes, it has a distinctly Germanic feel, both in its epic heaviness and in the peculiar way it revises the history of the American Revolution.
The fact that the Revolution was fought for a political ideal rather than blood and soil seems to have passed by both Emmerich and screenwriter Robert Rodat.
The "patriot" of the title goes to war because insanely malevolent and brutal bad guys in red coats have attacked his family and his farm. A widower with seven children, South Carolina plantation owner Benjamin Martin (a stolid Mel Gibson) is a veteran of the vicious French and Indian War.
He doesn't want to get involved in the impending Revolutionary War, but his oldest son, Gabriel (Heath Ledger), joins the Continental Army against his father's wishes.
After Charlestown falls to the British, a wounded Gabriel takes refuge on the family farm. But psychopathic British cavalry officer Col. Tavington (Jason Isaacs) turns up and takes him away to be hanged.
When one of Martin's younger sons tries to stop Gabriel's arrest, Tavington guns him down on the spot. Now motivated to join the war, Martin takes his two preteen boys into the woods, and in an implausible but thrilling scene, takes on a 20-man British detail and rescues Gabriel. He then hides his kids with his dead wife's sexy sister (Joely Richardson), joins the rebel militia and becomes "The Ghost," leading a platoon of mountain-men irregulars against British supply lines. Martin is based on several real-life rebels, in particular Francis Marion, "The Swamp Fox," an effective guerrilla leader (and notorious slaughterer of Indians) against loyalist forces in the Carolinas. Martin's archenemy, Col. Tavington, leader of the Green Dragoons, is a version of Banastre Tarleton, a British cavalry officer who led a partly American (loyalist) force, also called the Green Dragoons.
Even if you allow for some poetic license (while exploding cannonballs look good on film, they sure didn't exist in the 18th century), there are problems with the film's picture of the American Revolution.
"The Patriot" turns the war into a kind of Vietnam, with Americans as the Viet Cong and the British committing one atrocity after another. One scene features redcoats rounding up American rebel civilians, locking them in a church and roasting them alive. Nothing like it took place during the Revolution - although it's the exact atrocity committed by the SS Death's Head division in France in 1944. Making the redcoats into cartoon SS men misses the whole point of the Revolution: It was truly about political ideals.
But instead, the movie delivers a lot of New Age, baby-boomer sentimental guff about family - combined with a pretend horror at the nastiness war brings out even in good guys.
The film plays down the Southerness of South Carolina, scrupulously eschewing Southern accents and turning Southern gentlemen into guys who could be Northern college profs.
And there's a problem with the way the film portrays race and slavery. Not since "Gone with the Wind" has there been such a ludicrous, dishonest depiction of happy, loyal black folk down on the plantation. (Many slaves were quick to join the British.)
On the other hand, the film delivers a
wonderfully real sense of the terrors of 18th-century battle,
when highly drilled armies formed lines and the side that
could absorb the most musket volleys without
breaking ranks was the winner.