Patriotic whitewash

Rating: Null/10 (5 July 2000)

The British do not fare well in Mel Gibson movies. 'Braveheart' made effete treachery, murder and blackmail seem like the main British virtues. In 'The Patriot' British soldiers shoot wounded prisoners, execute civilians, commit mass murder and generally nasty up the landscape. The American militia fighters are saints by comparison.
Was the Revolutionary War really this horrible in South Carolina? There were elements of guerrilla warfare and civil war in that conflict, but I doubt if the British were as bad as portrayed in 'The Patriot.' It seems Hollywood movies today are not content with giving us conventional bad guys. They have to give us human flesh-eating serial killers (Hannibal) or military psychopaths like the British in 'The Patriot.'
Still ... the real groaner in 'The Patriot' is the way it distorts reality on the touchy question of slavery. After all, Hollywood can't make Mel a hero with feet of clay. They can't glamorize colonial America's fight for freedom while accurately portraying the slavery that made the Founding Fathers hypocrites.
Here I am on solid ground, since I recently read "Slaves in the Family." The book details the lives of a South Carolina plantation family and their slaves from colonial days to the present. Slaves in South Carolina were treated worse than draft animals -- bought and sold, worked relentlessly, whipped, and punished for running away by being branded or having ears or toes amputated. For most of South Carolina's history, it was illegal to free a slave.
Mel Gibson is clearly a wealthy landowner in 'The Patriot,' with a dozen or more black people working in his house and fields. Yet when passing British trooops tell his workers they are no longer slaves, one of them declares that Mel's blacks are not slaves, but free men.
Huh?
And later when Mel and his family are running from the British, they seek refuge in an idyllic seaside village populated entirely by black people who are obviously not slaves. Mel and his kids are given refuge by Abigale, their former housekeeper and mammy. It's a touching scene when Mel's kids are reunited with Abigale ... and as phony as anything ever filmed.
The black character who gets the most screen time is a slave who fights in Mel's guerrilla band. His master is too old to fight, so he sends a slave in his stead. Enduring the racial taunts of his "comrades," the slave discovers he will be freed if he serves a year for the revolutionary cause. During that year he saves the life of one of the worst white bigots, and when his year is up he continues to fight for "freedom."
Fat chance.
'The Patriot' has some virtues as entertainment, but those are ruined for me by its completely distorted portrayal of slavery. The contradictions and glory of our Revolution deserve honest treatment.