The British Are Groaning

The Patriot

National Review Online, July 3, 2000

I may be slow, but I'm beginning to think that there's something about us Brits that Mel Gibson doesn't like. First there was Gallipoli in which he played a plucky Australian soldier sent to fight the Turks in World War I. Mel and his fellow recruits are portrayed as free spirits, condemned to a tragic death by their snobbish and incompetent colonial masters, the English.

Then came Braveheart and the limeys get libeled again. The dust and sun of the Dardanelles may have been replaced by the rain and mud of medieval Scotland, but the bad guys remain the same, duplicitous, callous and very, very English. In Braveheart a curious, ahistorical fable (strangely described in NR and NRO as a conservative movie) Mr. Gibson, who also directed, plays William Wallace as a tartan reprise of his role in Mad Max The Scottish leader is shown as, you guessed it, a virile free spirit, a broadsword-wielding contrast to the cruel, yet foppish, invaders from the south. The English are bad in battle and worse in bed. To underline his hero's masculine superiority over the effete enemy, Gibson has Wallace successfully romancing a proto-Princess Diana, Princess Isabella (Sophie Marceau). As Isabella was French and her husband, the English king's son, was homosexual, Gibson's audience may see this as less of a coup than the star would have liked. They would be wrong. Such an affair would have been a truly remarkable testament to Wallace's powers of attraction as, in real life, the mutinous Scot never actually met Isabella. Mr. Gibson, however, doesn't always worry too much about real life.

Which brings me to The Patriot, Mel's latest assault on the evil empire (London edition). In this Revolutionary War epic Mr. Gibson plays, yet again, a splendid free spirit, Colonel Benjamin Martin, a South Carolina farmer loosely based on Francis Marion, one of the heroes of the American war of independence. Martin is a good father, industrious farmer and all-round upright citizen. After the usual agonized "war is bad" introspection required of the fighting man in contemporary entertainment culture, he is also a devastatingly effective warrior — Mad Max in a tricorn.

His opponent, Bad Max, is the beastly English colonel, William Tavington. He too is meant to be based on a real person, the ridiculously named Banastre Tarleton. All sneer and saber, Tavington torches churches, burns congregations alive and shoots children in the back. The closest we get to a sympathetic Redcoat is, unpromisingly, Lord Cornwallis, but he, sadly, bears the stigmata of the typical Gibson Englishman. He's a fop (there's a lot of fuss about his clothes), a loser in war, and a loser in love — his two Great Danes are seduced away from him by Colonel Martin. In a manner rather reminiscent of Princess Isabella they then spend the rest of the movie chasing after Mr. Gibson with their tongues hanging out.

There are others, however, on Mel's tail. A small, rather less friendly, posse of British journalists is also in pursuit, citing the numerous historical inaccuracies that litter the movie. Well, why not? The Patriot can easily be seen as a crude caricature of the English. A few snippy comments from London are to be expected. We're used to Mr. Gibson by now, but his film has come at a bad time. In Saving Private Ryan Steven Spielberg wrote the British out of D-Day, and you had to wait until the final credits to discover that the all-American heroics of the recent U-571 were based on a British exploit.

Now there's a movie planned on the German POW camp at Colditz, with some successful American escapees mysteriously added to the historical record. How, I wonder, would America react, if the English treated U.S. history in this way, making, perhaps, a movie about 'Nigel' McCain (played perhaps by Ralph Fiennes), the RAF's man in the Hanoi Hilton? Not well, I think. We English on the other hand, can take this punishment with only a grumble or two. We beat Hitler (by ourselves, actually, according to my latest film script) and we can survive Hollywood.

So, do your worst, trash our past. We don't care. We've got plenty to spare. And it's not just the past, Brits are bad in the most recent Mission Impossible, a Die Hard or two, even Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Spike, the really nasty vampire). And you don't have to stop with villains who are at least nominally English — Josef Mengele, Darth Vader, Hannibal Lecter — we'll take your money and play them all.

Is it a nasty stereotype? You bet, but the English won't complain (much). It's the Americans, who probably should, however. In the culture wars, the movies' constant characterization of the British as venal, effete and vicious is, I suspect, a last kick at the United States' faded WASP ascendancy, a sly reminder that, in Hollywood's view, this country's Anglo roots should no longer count for very much.

But, unsurprisingly, they do with me, which is why I could enjoy The Patriot without too many (English) patriotic qualms. In many ways the American Revolution was a continuation of a long argument over how Britons should be ruled, the second round, if you like, of the seventeenth century civil war in England. Yes, the troops sent across the Atlantic by (German) George III were sent packing — but it was by folks called Washington, Gates and Pickens. It hurt at the time, but when we British consider our history, a defeat only counts when it's to people with names like Schmidt, Watanabe or Depardieu. In the Revolutionary War, you see, we Brits essentially lost to ourselves, and that's not so bad. We just won't mention that Lafayette fellow.

So in The Patriot, you watch two opposing armies, both of which march under the red, white and blue — the English of the Philadelphia regime against the English of the London government. In the end, the better Englishmen won. The away team, my team, left the pitch at Yorktown and went off to establish a second, wider, empire — a remarkable achievement, Mel, for such a feeble race. The victors, meanwhile, went on to build a country that has inspired the world. So, this year, as I always do, I'll celebrate the fourth of July. Drink in hand, I'll toast the men who made this possible, the founding fathers who wrote, in that Declaration of Independence, some of the finest words that have ever been written in the English language.

Yes, that's right, the English language. My language.