Monty Python's History of Britain

Rating: 5/10 (11 November 2006)

The colonial chip on Mel Gibson's shoulder is so large in this pure Hollywood re-imagining of English-Scottish history that more often than not it threatens to cave in one side of the director's body, leaving him a crippled, diseased ghoul dragging the divided dead flesh through the mud, trying to say "Freedom" through a sore covered, misshapen mouth. Unfortunately this didn't happen to Gibson, instead his survived untouched to give us this take on English aggression, so one sided and ludicrous it could have been filmed by Dr Joseph Goebbels' film bureau in fact much like it exists in the Nazi's back catalogue. This skirts around the truth about Braveheart, namely that it's the product of a filmmaker/actor who's an abhorrent anti-Semite, right wing bigot and drunk who's barely disguised prejudice masks what can only be generously described as a selective attitude toward repression and the subjugation of entire peoples. Substitute the Scottish for the Jews for example and it's hard to imagine the pendulum swinging quite so far toward the persecuted. It's okay to paint the English as caricatures of course because it's set in the 13th century and who cares about the contemporaneous message when it's smeared in the long long ago, right? Tell that to the Scots. Gibson's tale of the boo-hiss moustache twirling Anglo-Saxons raping their women, hanging their manfolk and the like, went a long a way to reigniting the fervent and somewhat pernicious strain of nationalism that has always lain at the heart of the Scottish psyche. Finally here was the movie that said that anti-English bigotry was okay, even to be encouraged  a green light for the simpleminded. Yes, that's right my wee lads and lassies, all that crap your Mum and Dad told you about the English being arrogant, domineering scum who'd repressed your people for hundreds of years had now received the patronage of film. That's even better than reality isn't it? In any event once it's on film it's almost true anyway surely so even if the film's thrust is dishonest and the stuff of folklore invention it hardly matters. Gibson, with his blue face paint and poster-boy speeches for freedom (as long as you're a gentile of course) waved the flag for imagined tyranny in a country that had benefited from the Union with England financially and culturally for 300 years. The likes of the SNP, the political wing of Scottish bigotry and that occasional patriot, the tax exile Sean Connery all leaped on the bandwagon ensuring Gibson's iconic status from Berwick to Banff. The problem and I'm sorry to break this to any Celtic readers, is that photographing a propaganda piece with reality left to watch from behind the camera doesn't make any of it true. Gibson's film may be effectively packaged, romantically scored and crafted to stoke the fire of audience hatred but beyond all of that its true significance lies in the revealing hand of its director and the reaction of the people it purports to represent. Ironically the only ones to emerge from the film with any dignity are the vilified English  a patient audience if ever there was one.