Braveheart Delivers Like Campbell's Soup for the Soul

Rating: 10/10 (16 March 2011)

After nearly fifteen, long years, I finally went out and bought this one just to see it again at my pleasure (after having seen it some five times before anyway), and in the forlorn hope that maybe Hollywood's artistic license might have finally given way to some measure of historical accuracy. William Wallace has always been one of my heroes—sort of a tortuous cross between Ethan Allen, George Rogers Clark, "Mad" Anthony Wayne, Stephen Decatur, and James Fenimore Cooper's fictitious Hawkeye. It was the film depiction of his nation's true-to-life brawl against the forces of English King Edward I Plantagenet Longshanks of this period (Edward, incidentally, was known as "Longshanks" owing to his "great" height at 6'2", towering over his subjects who averaged, at the time, at about 5'6"— tops).
The film Braveheart itself, however, depicts the adult-life struggle of Wallace (Mel Gibson) to unify and galvanize his troops, and wrest his own Scots people free of the English Crown interloper, Edward I (Patrick McGoohan), who had set his eyes on Scotland ever since his ascendancy to the throne upon the death of his father, Henry III Plantagenet, in AD 1272. In addition, it took Edward nearly thirty-three years to nearly accomplish the objective never actually fully granted to him by force of arms. In the interim, Wallace is treated to everything from the horrid sight of hanged children, sexual purveyance (primoris nocti-actually, jus primae noctis) and the sanctioned murder of his own wife (Catherine McCormack) by a commandant of English regulars, battle sequences at Cambuskenneth Bridge, Stirling and Falkirk that you can "feel", and betrayal by one of his own confidants—both on the field—and the one off—that sealed his ultimate fate, resulting in his "traitor's" death at Smithfield, London on 24 August 1305. Gibson as (also) director was entirely charitable in visually sparing us most of the gratuitously gory details of this ghastly method of judicial execution.
As depicted in the film, Wallace was betrayed and captured in Scotland and sent south in AD 1305. There, in the Great Hall of Westminster, he was charged with and convicted of the five crimes of treason, sacrilege, robbery, murder, and arson—and with the attendant penalties for each. He was branded and hanged until unconscious (and not racked as shown); then revived, castrated, drawn and judicially eviscerated with his living entrails burned before his very eyes, beheaded (mercifully), and finally quartered.
His head was placed on a pike on then-London Bridge for all to see, and with the rest of his dismembered remains sent north for everyone else to see: his right arm to Newcastle, his left arm to Berwick, his right leg and torso to Perth, and his left leg and quarter to Aberdeen. Of course, this legal atrocity detonated in England's face some nine years later when King Robert I, 17th Earl of Bruce in Scotland thoroughly routed Longshanks' son's (Edward II's) troops at Bannockburn in AD 1314. It was "payback" time for the kangaroo-court murder of Wallace and Bannockburn was the deliverance; they being the promise and the proof, respectively.
His poignant end came, supine on the scaffold, seeing everyone from his slain wife come back to life, his friend who had betrayed him, and thoughts of Isabella, Princess of Wales (Sophie Marceau). Momentously, all the children who were compelled to watch this grisly, fourteenth-century killing brings to Braveheart a certain welcome pathos with the execution—a pity that subliminally encourages us to believe that the sacrifice was indeed "worth it".
Moreover, it is a reminder to all of us that freedom does indeed not only come with an expensive price tag, but with the continued price to pay that comes with any revolving line of credit connecting individual life and liberty.
However, now, some five inconsistencies need to be addressed here:
First, Wallace was not a peasant. He was raised and formally educated in the French Court and was a direct descendant of the Welsh Walays who had been earlier granted lands in Ayrshire, Scotland in AD 1110.
Second, there is no record whatsoever of the practice of primoris nocti, or the "first night". There was, however, the rule of "jus primae noctis", the law of the first night, which hovered for centuries over the villeins of Europe, and upheld by both the church and secular sybaritic jurisprudence.
Third, Edward Longshanks did not murder Edward, Prince of Wales' male lover, Peter de (Piers) Gaveston. He was murdered in AD 1312, some five years after Longshanks' death in July 1307.
Fourth, William "Braveheart" Wallace was not captured, as depicted, by foolishly walking straight into a British military outpost. Instead, he was deliberately betrayed by one of his closest friends who invited him for a drink at an inn in a little Scottish village called Robroyston.
Lastly, the film also indirectly referred to Isabella's "pregnancy" by Wallace. There is no record of Isabella having her first issue until AD 1312, the birth year of Edward III.
Overall, I gave Braveheart a five-star rating for not only its art direction and acting, but also, in a larger sense, for bringing to bear and to underscore the plight of the Scottish nation in those dark days. As an interesting aside, and for a number of years before Braveheart's release, the local Scots government in Edinburgh had been attempting to wrest more and more home rule from Whitehall, however, with little public support.
After the release of this movie, though, the community became fired up and electrified as Wallace's military troops were 700 years before, and home rule was eventually granted with England kowtowing to Scots' public pressure. The Scottish people thanked Mel Gibson profusely and he is now the unofficial, local national hero there, and no respectable household in the West Highlands' wee glens is devoid of a copy of this motion picture.