Very Well Made But Historically Inaccurate Film...

Rating: 7/10 (5 June 2006)

Nominated for ten Academy Awards and winner of 'Oscars' for Makeup, Sound Effects Editing, Cinematography (John Toll), Best Director and Picture, few can argue that this movie was not well made. This film managed to propel Sir William Wallace, the infamous 13th-century Scottish hero through nearly seven centuries via the magic of a Hollywood script that took great liberties with historical fact.
While many praised this movie's epic film making accomplishment, just as many historians decried it's lack of historical accuracy. The film's script, by American screenwriter Randall Wallace (no relation), of William's life, love, and death owes much to Blind Harry, a 15th century minstrel who put his rhymes into writing *150* years after Wallace's execution. Wallace historians and biographers continually dispute part or all of Blind Harry's narrative, but his account of the patriot's life DOES provide the most entertaining version of the tale.
Blind Harry also used a heavy hand when sprinkling his tale with bitter sweet passion. His mention of a young maiden named Marion Braidfute of Lamington, who Wallace allegedly courted and wed, provided the inspiration for Murron (Catherine McCormack), Wallace's secret wife in this movie. However, no factual evidence of the marriage survives to corroborate Blind Harry's, and now Hollywood's, tale. On the other hand, Wallace DID murder Sir William Heselrig, English sheriff of Lanmark. Wallace put him to the sword and cut him into pieces in May 1297.
One of the film's most intriguing twists is pure Hollywood invention. A calendar puts the LIE to the tale of Wallace's affair with Princess Isabella (Sophie Marceau), wife of Prince Edward II, and the fathering of her child. Isabella and Edward II married in 1307, two years AFTER Wallace's execution. Her son Edward III, was born in the years that followed. Incidentally,Wallace was executed by hanging, drawing and quartering, not by being disemboweled at the gallows as the film suggests. The script was also very unkind to Edward I (Patrick McGoohan) specifically, and to the Normans in general, who no historian will dispute, regardless of tactics, unified a then very culturally diverse England and molded it into the great nation it still is to this day.
MANY other inaccuracies appear in this film as well, too many to name here, the most glaring of which had Wallace attired in the more familiar Highlander costumes when he was, in fact, a Lowlander. So what we have here is a film that is almost as much a fantasy as it is an epic. But admittedly, it is the good-guy, bad-guy scenario that is the proved Hollywood formula for success.
The true power of this medium is that it has the ability to EDUCATE as well as to entertain, and it's truly shameful that so many viewers think this movie is an accurate representation of historical fact. It is NOT! See it for the character portrayals, costumes and well orchestrated battle scenes. But remember, the story itself is as much a self-serving, Hollywood-formula fantasy, as it is somehow well done.