good battle scenes, sappy drama

Rating: Null/10 (18 November 2000)

`The Patriot' is at its most authentic when it concentrates on the ugly brutalities of its Revolutionary War battle scenes and at its least authentic when it focuses on its own dramatic, storytelling elements which are, all too often, marked by heavy-handed contrivance, bathos and plain old-fashioned corniness. Alas, for those of us who approached this film with high expectations and high hopes, the bad news is that the latter aspect takes up far more screen time than does the former.

This latest directorial effort by Roland Emmerich at least has the advantage of novelty working in its favor in that few films of recent times have even bothered to chronicle and recreate this particular period in American history. All too often we think of the people who helped found this new nation in almost plaster saint terms, and `The Patriot' seems, for a while at least, as if it is going to try to portray them in a more complex, well-rounded light. Benjamin Martin (Mel Gibson) is presented to us as a reluctant warrior, a man initially opposed to the war because he wants to protect his family from harm yet who, after one of his own sons is brutally murdered by the British, suddenly takes up arms, as much out of a sense of personal revenge as out of a commitment to cause and principle. So far so good  yet as the drama unfolds, we become more and more skeptical of what we are seeing on screen. As a director of crowd-pleasing extravaganzas in the past (`Independence Day,' `Godzilla'), Emmerich just can't seem to resist indulging in all the requisite Hollywood touches that end up trivializing the seriousness of the film's subject matter. For instance, the scene in which Martin almost single-handedly slaughters a group of fully armed Redcoats plays like the typical action scene in any conventional Gibson vehicle. Nor is the director much more successful in his attempts to humanize the characters. The scenes between Martin and his son, for instance, as well as those between him and his dead wife's beautiful sister or between his son and the girl who becomes his sweetheart all reek equally of phoniness and sentimentality. This is not helped one whit either by the syrupy, bombastic symphonic score provided by John Williams which sounds, quite literally, as if he lifted it directly from the soundtrack of his own `Jurassic Park.'
In an effort to turn this epic struggle for freedom into a simplistic rah-rah action film, Emmerich and writer Robert Rodat have created a British commander so villainous that he stops just short of twirling a handlebar moustache every time he utters a command to mow down injured prisoners or set ablaze a church filled with unarmed men, women and children sympathetic to the rebel cause. This character, who also plays a major role in the death of Martin's son, provides the protagonist with a rather cheap foil against which to fight and the audience with a convenient target at whom it can hiss, boo and jeer. Thus, the filmmakers reduce this complex battle for liberty to the level of conventional, lowest common denominator melodrama when what we crave is the kind of hard edged moral complexity we find in war movies like `Glory' and `The Last of the Mohicans.'
Visually, `The Patriot' is a knockout, filled with widescreen images of glorious autumnal landcapes with or without battling armies in the foreground. Structurally, however, the 165-minute film suffers from distention and attenuation with a screenplay that involves itself with far too many subsidiary characters to keep the drama neatly in focus. The pace often seems languid as we wile away the time between impressive, but sometimes all-too-brief clashes between opposing armies. For it is in these scenes that `The Patriot' manages to excel. Those sensitive to movie violence may object to the graphic nature of these depictions of brutal wartime carnage. Yet, it is in just this refusal to sugarcoat the horrors of the blood-soaked battlefield that `The Patriot' finds its one element of validity and truth. Unfortunately, the realistic nature of these sequences only serves to further emphasize the phoniness of much of the rest of the film. The overall failure of `The Patriot' is a shame because the Revolutionary War remains fertile territory for a filmmaker willing to provide a less pandering, audience-friendly approach to the subject. We eagerly await that future film's arrival.