The Patriot

What do you do when July 4th is menaced by a lack of jingoistic, flag-waving cinema for us righteous Americans to gawk and cheer at? You turn to two Australian actors, of course — old action pro Mel Gibson and "dreamy" Heath Ledger, who looks like nothing more than Leonardo DiCaprio's elder brother, which means he looks about 16 years old — to show America's liberation from Britain and her taxing ways. And while you're at it, bring in Stuttgart-born Roland Emmerich, director of such entertainingly vapid summer fare as "Independence Day" (the film that introduced to the world the phrase "the obligatory Chinese Air Force shot") and "Godzilla," to make sure everything blows up in proper fashion. They'll wave the flag and wield their muskets proudly enough to chase those pesky redcoats off of our purple mountains majesty and fruited plains and back to the land of tea and crumpets! Right?

Not to put too fine a point on it, but no, they don't. Well, they do win the war, but they don't solve the Fourth of July cinema problem. Why is this? Emmerich and (presumably) Gibson have decided to abandon their proven talents for lowest-common-denominator filmmaking and give the audience what it really didn't ask for: a film dramatizing the sacrifices our Revolutionary patriots made in ridding the land of our country's very first red menace. This in itself should not be a film-killing decision, but any interest in this film will definitely expire before the film runs its enormously overlong (three-hour) course. So what's wrong? How could such experienced crowd-pleasers screw up (pun coming up) so royally?

The gaping historical inaccuracies surely don't help. Of the major sins this film commits, the most egregious is definitely the papering-over of racial issues. We are asked to believe that white South Carolinians, who just gave up a heated battle involving placing of the flag of a state founded to perpetrate the subjugation of black people above their state capitol, would in the space of two hours and forty minutes not only become comfortable with black men serving in their regiments but would also get down to Gullah music at Heath Ledger's wedding party. The French guy takes a lot of rhetoric from the Revolution his country would undergo eight years after the film ends, which is admirable but probably implausible. And nobody actually bothered to study what Revolutionary people talked like when trying to write "antique" dialogue, with the result that, when Gibson cocks his pistol on an intruder, he instructs said lowlife to "Slowly turn." It is to laugh.

On the other hand, no one would care about historical inaccuracies if the film were sufficiently rousing, and it ain't. So what's wrong? There are entertaining scenes of Mel Gibson wielding his lethal hatchet with a brave heart as he gets mad to the max on a bunch of Brits who make the mistake of killing his son. The combat scenes are gritty, featuring cannonballs winning bloody skirmishes with parts of Yankee anatomy. The head British villain is sufficiently sneery and cruel for at least two normal villains, and his atrocities are depicted unflinchingly. On its surface, the horrors of war are depicted well, and they are shown affecting people who might have been supposed to be characters in enormously discursive scenes which should have been tightened up. Yet these scenes are curiously unaffecting. The brutality, the love, the loss, everything — it all feels like it's happening not to people but to ciphers. Why?

Because ciphers are who they're happening to, in a very real way. This is not a film about the American Revolution, about people standing up to die for beliefs and principles and freedom and representation. This is not a film in which the main characters are overtaken with the spirit of what we have come to think of as America. This is a film about Mel Gibson not wanting to fight anyone at all until some British guy kills his son. This is a film about Mel subsequently harrassing that British general, and him getting madder and madder, until finally he has to start killing members of Mel's family. This is a film where you know after the first thirty minutes that there is going to be a Final Showdown between Mel the Hero and Brit the Villain.

In short, at its heart, this is a crappy action movie, nothing more. Every time Gibson and Emmerich try to make it more than that, they're wasting time, theirs and yours. They don't believe in America any more than Jacques Chirac does; they believe in crappy action films. They pretend they don't with their endless weepy scenes, but ultimately this film that proves they do anyway. And it's not even a good crappy action movie, thanks to the endless discursions mentioned above. This is exactly the same movie as "Braveheart" and Schwartzenegger's "Commando" and Glenn Ford's "The Big Heat" and every other movie where one man has to take on an army of thugs to save his family. That, in itself, is not such a sin. It's pretending that this movie is what it manifestly is not that makes "The Patriot" a truly bad film. If you love America and great American filmmaking, stay away.

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