Americas 250th Birthday Cinemathon #9: The Patriot (2000)

 

The last of my American Revolution movies is The Patriot, the “largest” film portraying the conflict and one of the more controversial. Its director, Roland Emmerich, is famously a German who fell in love with the United States (perhaps not unlike Prussian officer Baron von Steuben!), so this movie is right up his alley. The Patriot is a semi-fictionalized account of Francis Marion’s guerilla war in South Carolina. Marion had already been an officer in the Continental Army, but rose to fame as a guerilla leader when the British mounted its major southern campaign in 1780. His effective hit-and-run attacks on British and Loyalist forces earned him the moniker “The Swamp Fox.”

Earlier drafts presented a more accurate and less black-and-white picture of the fighting in the South, but Emmerich insisted that he be allowed to make changes for a more crowd-pleasing good vs. evil narrative. This explains why Francis Marion is renamed Benjamin Martin. The historical Marion and his men sometimes engaged in can be considered war crimes. Marion was also a slaveholder, and had orders from above to execute any black man found fighting for or aiding the British.

Controversially, The Patriot reveals that Benjamin Martin (Mel Gibson), is using free black labor. Gibson received the blame for his whitewashing, as his last historical epic role was in the similarly anti-British Braveheart. Actually, he argued that in this regard the movie should tell the truth, but Emmerich overrode him. To be honest, the character is more enjoyable to follow after this change, but it was a bit of cowardly rewriting.

Unlike Marion, the widower Martin wants to sit out the war. Haunted by his participation in the French and Indian War, he doesn’t want his children to endure the same thing, though this doesn’t stop his oldest son Gabriel (Heath Ledger) from joining the Continental Army. When the war heats up in South Carolina, a British cavalry force under Colonel William Tavington burns his plantation, steals away his hired labor, and kills his second oldest son, all because Martin helped Continental as well as British wounded. Motivated by vengeance, Martin forms a guerilla force.

Gabriel is the conscience of the film, an idealistic young man who joins his father and tries to steer him towards the bigger picture. He also courts Anne Patricia Howard (Lisa Brenner), a strong-willed young woman who gets a bunch of men to join Martin’s band with a patriotic speech. By the way, scene where Gabriel dates Ann while sewed inside a bed is based on an actual historical practice. By the end, his father lets revenge take a backseat in favor of the Revolutionary cause, even literally attacking the British with the American flag!

The supporting characters aren’t complex, but are fun. Martin’s band includes the Reverend Oliver (Rene Auberjonois), grizzled fellow war vet John Billings (Leon Rippy), slave Occam (Jay Arlen Jones), and Dan Scott (Donal Logue), the big racist who derides Occam’s dreams of earning his freedom, but comes to be his best friend. Also there’s a French liaison officer (Tchery Karyo), who for some reason is hanging out and fighting with a militia band instead of the regular army. I guess Emmerich likes his eclectic casts of characters (a big strength of his best film Independence Day).

The rest of Martin’s children are okay, but I did notice he bizarre fact that none of them age, as the film starts in 1776 and ends in 1781, but the little girls are still little girls. In terms of military leaders, George Washington and Nathaniel Greene have cameos, while Chris Cooper plays a fictional officer who is friends with Martin.

Tom Wilkinson's Cornwallis (right) speaks while Charles O'Hara produces some kind of face

The British in the movie created a lot of controversy, since Emmerich abandoned original ideas for a more balanced portrayal. The British often march into battle like automatons, and commit a slew of war crimes, the church burning scene in particular being borrowed from a literal Nazi atrocity in Greece! A lot of the officers also pompously talk about their foes as if they view them as simpleton “rustics”, a curious thing to say since many colonials in South Carolina sided with the British. Heading the British side is real-life General Charles Cornwallis (Tom Wilkinson), who to his credit is shown to be a professional soldier who at least initially insists that the civilians be treated well in hopes of post-war healing. General Charles O’Hara, Cornwallis’ real-life good friend, also appears, but more as a sounding board. Despite an attempt at a fair portrayal, Cornwallis does get a villain upgrade when he enables Tavington to cut loose on the Carolina countryside.

Speaking of which, Jason Isaacs gives a delicious performance as the ridiculously evil William Tavington (left). Tavington just sneers at the Revolutionaries, saying everything with an aristocratic voice. He builds up quite the rap sheet, too. Unfortunately for our heroes he’s also the only British officer who knows how to fight guerillas and get wins over Martin, though his attacks on civilians end up inspiring righteous vengeance. The real life Banastre Tarleton, whom he is based on, was certainly not a paragon of virtue, but he didn’t run around slaughtering the families of guerillas and also had a cordial relationship with Cornwallis unlike the antagonist once presented in the film. The movie does show that he had a lot of Loyalist Americans in his ranks, but we don’t get any deep examination of their motives except they think Revolution is treason.

The big draw of The Patriot for history buffs is the budget put into it. Characters and motivations might be sanitized or exaggerated, but the costuming and weaponry are dead on accurate, as producer Dean Devilin led a crew to the Smithsonian to study period artifacts. Most of the action scenes are small skirmishes between Martin’s band and British convoys, but there are a couple major battles, ones with good scale as opposed to the made-for-TV ones I saw in previous entries on my watch list.

The first is the Battle of Camden. This is the third and final time Horatio Gates gets crapped on in my list. The movie accurately shows his force getting routed by the British and chased by cavalry. However, Martin’s observation that the Americans are foolish to fight the British in traditional line battles is not quite accurate. This was true for much of the militia units, but the movie shows the regular Continental Army, which was well-trained to stand up in major battles and even won a few major ones. This regular army was necessary to show foreign nations that America was a proper country. If only guerilla tactics were employed, it would validate the British view that this was an uprising by rebels who wouldn’t fight in a civil manner.

The climactic battle is a hybrid of Cowpens and Guilford Court House. It’s like Cowpens in that it was the first major defeat for the British in the South, with Tarleton stand-in Tavington playing a major role. It is like Guilford Court House in that Nathaniel Greene commanded the Continental army there and that it was large, bloody affair. The British actually won Guilford Court House, but it was so costly that Cornwallis grew more cautious, then turned his army north into Virginia, a move that eventually led to his surrender at Yorktown (shown briefly at the film’s end). The action scenes are for the most part well done and thrilling, but a couple of the personal mano-a-mano moments do get pretty cheesy, with men swinging swords and rifles at each other in slow motion.

Martin compliments Jean Villeneuve (Tcheky Karyo) on the arrival of France's navy at Yorktown.

There’s so much more I could talk about, but I’ll just give a final shout-out to John Williams, who delivered an awesome patriotic musical score. With his genius, its hard not to feel stirred up when Mel Gibson charges the British Army with the Stars and Stripes.

I’m not going to lie, The Patriot has some problematic elements in how it transforms history into a scrappy rebels vs. evil empire narrative. Slavery is not eliminated from the narrative, but some of the facts surrounding it, such as the British black regiments, are removed or downplayed. The British are turned into the Galactic Empire. That being said, I had a blast rewatching this movie. I only have to turn off my historian brain a little bit to enjoy the fun characters and melodramatic moments.

Rating: 6/10