|
|
THE PATRIOT (Red, if not white and blue)
|
If there is a role less likely to win friends than playing Richard Nixon in an Oliver Stone movie, it must be playing an English soldier in a Mel Gibson movie. Aside from being condemned as a well-dressed two-dimensional punctilious thespian, you have a limited choice of outcome: if lucky, you are merely humiliated; if not, you die horribly amidst swelling John Williams music.
As the Last of the Bravehearts, Gibson plays Benjamin Martin, modeled on Francis Marion with the hagiographic character air-brushing expected in a Hollywood biopic (the real Marion kept slaves; Martin's are all freed men). A celebrated if brutal hero of the French and Indian War (where Daniel Day-Lewis did the hair-flinging, buckskin-flying, forest-sprinting, tomahawk-chucking frontier poet hunk better), he has returned home to peaceful South Carolina. From the first honeyed voiceover as we pan back from an engraved tomahawk, we know he Has Seen Too Much Of War And It Haunts Him. Martin will not fight until the obligatory atrocity is brought literally to his doorstep, whereupon peaceful his Dr. Jekyll is banished and there emerges a savage killer whom the British dub 'the Ghost' (instead of the Swamp Fox).
From here, five years of Revolutionary War are telescoped into two hours and forty minutes that only seem like four. Under Mel's Costner-esque direction, no cliché left unvoiced, no archetype held offstage, no scene not golden-hued (including South Carolina ocean sunsets, which takes some impressive solar reorientation). Young son tries on his father's old red coat, only to be cut down by a massacring dragoon. His father later melts down his lead soldiers, one by one, into musket balls, the last of which - surprise - Mel fires into the very dragoon who shot his son.
All the Braveheart tropes are here, even on fast forward: wife slain, farm plundered, army scattered, Mel retreats to the highlands or Sherwood Forest - er, the Santee River swamps - where he gathers a merrie band including a gun-totin' reverend (Rene Auberjonois), a slave earning his freedom through twelve months' service, and the obligatory crazy foreigner (in this case, a Frenchman played by a Czech) to guard his back.
The supporting cast all understand they may shine only in Mel's reflected burnished glow. Joely Richardson heaves such bosoms as she has, even sleeping in her formal dress so they are at ready view. New hunk Heath Ledger delivers a very presentable early-Mel militiaman. Idyllic children clutch straw dolls and wooden guns. British commanders fume over dressing gown embroidery while computer-generated ships discharge computer-multiplied redcoats for computer-enhanced battlefield gore. And the war, which actually covered seven long years, is telescoped down into a single charge in a single battle, where a single man -- guess who? -- picks up the fallen Colonial colors, stabilizes the line, and wins the day.
Patriotism, wrote Dr. Samuel Johnson in 1775, is the last refuge of the scoundrel. In the end, alas, this movie is BRAVEHEART without the romance, HENRY V without the language or elocution, 1776 without the songs or historical niceties. Though not wishing to be branded unpatriotic, I suggest you give it a miss.