Gibson's historical counterpart was Francis Marion, a guerrilla fighter who had the nickname "the Swamp Fox". Robert Rodat, the screen-writer of that epic, has now written The Patriot, a gory depiction of the American Revolution starring Mel Gibson, who has gone from slaughtering the English in Scottish hills in Braveheart to hacking them to pieces in the swamps of South Carolina. Saving Private Ryan provoked a rush of second World War nostalgia and pride in what is now called "the greatest generation". Much more acceptable are heroic feats against Germans with monocles and guttural accents and Japanese or Vietnamese with sing-song voices and nasty bayonets. They are like characters in a costume pageant."Īnother problem is that older Americans are apparently not comfortable with films showing their English cousins - allies in two world wars - as the villains. US historian David McCullough says: "A lot of us have trouble at first perceiving these people as real because of their clothing and the wigs and their mannered way of speaking.
Jack Warner of Warner Brothers, for example, had a rule: "I don't want any pictures where they write with feathers." One problem is getting modern Americans to relate to this period of wigs and quaint speech. A complete whitewashing of history.Hollywood has had problems portraying the American Revolution, when the colonials kicked out the British after a bloody war of independence over 200 years ago. “ The Patriot is pure, blatant American Hollywood propaganda. “For three hours The Patriot dodged around, skirted about or completely ignored slavery,” Lee wrote in a letter to the Hollywood Reporter.
In fact, The Patriot turns a blind eye to slavery altogether, a decision that received much attention from critics including director Spike Lee. According to the Guardian, however, evidence suggests the Swamp Fox was a man who actively persecuted Cherokee Indians (killing them for fun) and regularly raped his female slaves. The movie depicts Martin as a family man and hero who single-handedly defeats countless hostile Brits. As Stephen Hunter, a film critic and historian told the Telegraph, “Any image of the American Revolution which represents you Brits as Nazis and us as gentle folk is almost certainly wrong.”Īnother of the film’s egregious oversights lies with lead character Benjamin Martin (Mel Gibson), based on several real-life players in the American Revolution, including Francis “Swamp Fox” Marion, a militia leader from South Carolina. Meaning not only did the film paint a portrait of the British as cruel killers, it compared them to history’s worst: the Nazis. What’s worse? An almost identical crime - one of World War II’s most notorious atrocities - was carried out by Nazi soldiers in France in 1944. No such thing ever happened in the Revolutionary War. In one scene, redcoats are seen rounding up a village of screaming women, children and old men, locking them in a church and setting the building ablaze. Principal among the movie’s gross inaccuracies is the portrayal of British soldiers as evil, bloodthirsty sadists. “Truth is the first casualty in Hollywood’s war,” read the headline of the London Telegraph‘s take on The Patriot. Cast: Mel Gibson, Heath Ledger, Joely Richardson, Jason Isaacs, Chris Cooper Get This Movie
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