Not Your Real Swamp Fox

Rating: 8/10 (12 December 2010)

With the name changes of Francis Marion to Benjamin Martins and Banastre Tarleton to William Tavington, director Roland Emmerich was free to take a whole lot of liberty with the southern theater of the American Revolution. If anyone is expecting to see a factual account of what happened in the south from 1779 to 1781 they will be gravely disappointed.
Mel Gibson is the Martins/Marion character and the biggest poetic license was taken with that character. Most basic of all Marion is presented as a family man who was a veteran of the French and Indian War and took up arms again when his plantation was sacked and son killed. Francis Marion was a bachelor, he got married and did raise a family after the Revolution was won. But that certainly would have knocked a very large prop out of Gibson's character motivation.
Jason Isaacs is the Tavington/Tarleton character and he's every bit as nasty a piece of work as Banastre Tarleton was in real life. The man relished war and killing and believed in waging totally against His Majesty's rebels. The phrase 'Tarleton's Quarter' came into the language after he massacred some colonial troops who had surrendered. He was real big on those kind of atrocities, Governor Thomas Jefferson of Virginia fled with no dignity when he got word that Tarleton's troops were minutes away from Monticello. He knew exactly what the author of The Declaration of Independence would have received at his hands.
It would have been poetic and nice if he had met his end during the Revolutionary War, but Tarleton went back to the United Kingdom and took up a seat in Parliament and was a noted defender of slavery and slave interests. You can see him at work doing that in the film Wilberforce which concerns William Wilberforce's campaign to halt the African slave trade.
Heath Ledger as Gibson's oldest son and Joely Richardson make a fine pair of eager young people looking eagerly to a new nation dedicated to what Jefferson espoused in The Declaration of Independence. Rene Auberjonois's character of a fighting parson is borrowed from George Bernard Shaw's Reverend Anthony Anderson in The Devil's Disciple.
Tom Wilkinson plays Lord Cornwallis and he appears in too many history books to give him a pseudonym. But for some reason Chris Cooper's character who was Cornwallis's opposite number is not called Nathanael Greene. He's one of the most remarkable commanders of the Revolutionary War, a man who never won a battle, but managed to hold the British army completely at bay in the southern theater due in no small part to people like Mel Gibson's Benjamin Martins(Francis Marion). There is mention in the film of General Horatio Gates who fled after the Battle of Charleston which the British totally routed the colonials and took the seaport of Charleston. It was Greene who was brought in to replace the mistakenly highly touted Gates.
Francis Marion is sometimes given the credit of starting the use of guerrilla war methods, but that distinction properly should go to Major Robert Rogers during the French and Indian War. Marion certainly was skilled in the art of it as The Patriot shows. As for Rogers he was a Tory in his political beliefs and offered to get a guerrilla outfit going for the Crown, but was not taken up on his offer.
The Patriot received Oscar nominations for Best Cinematography, Best Music Score, and Best Sound not winning in any of those categories. But the film deserved those nominations. John Williams in doing the music successfully integrated period songs with some modern themes and the cinematography, especially in the battle scenes showed what combat was like in that era. They were every bit as well done as Ted Turner's Civil War trilogy or Pearl Harbor.
The Patriot if not the story Marion and Tarleton who probably never met face to face in real life is still a good depiction of the issues surrounding the American Revolution.