Bob Thomas
Of all the major U.S. wars, the Revolutionary War has been the most overlooked by the movie industry.
Over the years, Hollywood studios have concluded that audiences cannot connect with characters in powdered wigs and three-cornered hats who shoot front-loading muskets. Now Columbia Pictures is striving to combat that notion with “The Patriot,” a big-scale epic with Mel Gibson for box-office star power, playing a respected South Carolina landowner and widower with seven growing children.
Gibson’s Benjamin Martin is unswayed by the call to arms sparked by the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia. The hidden reason: a hero in the French and Indian War, he is haunted by the atrocities of which he was a party.
His teen-age son, played by Heath Ledger, is eager to join the Continental Army, but his father forbids him.
The situation changes when British troops, led by a sadistic colonel played by Jason Isaacs, invade Gibson’s plantation. After helplessly watching his family brutalized and his son carried off to be hanged, Gibson regains his war fervour.
He organizes a ragtag militia and starts a guerrilla campaign that thwarts the Brits’ plans for an easy victory in the South.
While both sides were lining up their troops and firing point-blank at each other, Gibson employs stealth strategy he and his followers hurtling out of swamps and forests for sudden attacks on small enemy units. They concentrate their fire on officers, a tactic the British consider not quite cricket.
The redcoats are commanded by Gen. Cornwallis (the fine English actor Tom Wilkinson), who believes the colonists can be subdued by time-worn British army methods. Gibson arranges a meeting with Cornwallis to exchange prisoners. The episode is the most engaging in the movie; Gibson tricks the stuffy general and even steals his two prize great Danes.
The fighting sequences are offset by Gibson’s returns to his family, whose lives are threatened by the vindictive colonel. There is a hint of romance with his dead wife’s sister (Charlotte Selton), but most of the time she is limited to casting fond looks.
Having fought the British centuries before in “Braveheart,” Gibson brings the same intensity to “The Patriot.” He aptly portrays the complex nature of a warrior turned pacifist who must take up arms again.
Ledger is effective as the militiaman’s son, though his character is sketchily defined.
Wilkinson’s Cornwallis dominates his scenes and would almost be likable except for his snobbish pigheadedness. And Isaacs is allowed to play the sadistic colonel way over the top.
Roland Emmerich (“Independence Day”) directed “The Patriot” with his usual flourish, assisted by digital magic that can make the line of troops seem a mile wide.
John Williams’ thundering score contributes to the drama. Robert Rodat’s screenplay keeps a good balance between military and family matters, but most of the plot turns have a deja vu quality the stuff of many a Hollywood war movie or Western.
The tendency in period movies like this is to write stilted dialogue. That may be how they wrote, but it’s hard to imagine that they spoke that way in normal conversation.
“The Patriot” seems likely to stir rebuttal from historians, especially those on the other side of the pond. Did the British army really commit Nazilike atrocities during the Revolutionary War?
The Columbia Pictures release was produced by Dean Devlin, Mark Gordon and Gary Levinsohn.
(AP)