Cinema
The Patriot (15, selected cinemas)
Perfidious Albion
Mark Steyn
Mel Gibson's back and this time, just to stretch himself, he's playing a plucky, heroic man of the people who finds himself having to stand up to the ruthless, duplici- tous, snobbish, effete English.
Hang on, I hear you cry. Didn't he already do that in Braveheart? Ah, yes, but in Braveheart he wore a kilt. In The Patriot he wears a tricorn.
Just a minute, I hear you cry again. Didn't he already wear a tricorn to stand up to the ruthless, duplicitous, snobbish, effete English in Gallipoli? Well, no, that's an Australian hat, looks a bit like a tricorn from an angle.
Okay, I hear you cry yet again. But which is the one where he's rugged and down to earth and the English are a bunch of thin- lipped preening fops nancying about in fagola costumes?
Er, well, they all are. But fortunately the English have oppressed so many diverse peoples around the globe that there's no end of variety to the long-suffering colo- nials Mel can play. This time round, he's Benjamin Martin, a farmer in South Car- olina in 1776 who wants no part of the Revolution. He's a widower struggling with his couple of dozen kids, give or take, and no one to help out except platoons of devoted black servants and his sister-in-law, played by the lovely Joely Richardson. But then the Redcoats ride in, kill one of the kids, and force Mel to revise his pacifist detachment. He embarks on a bloody gueril- la campaign against the forces of the Crown that eventually leads to the British losing the war. Sorry to give away the ending.
Like all Mel's explorations of perfidious Albion, The Patriot is based on a true story. But by the time the true story's been pro- cessed to suit the needs of the star and the director (Roland Emmerich), it looks pretty much like any old Hollywood fiction. It's mandatory in period drama now to interpo- late an African-American to serve as the conscience of the cause, the promise of a better world to come. So, in The Patriot, a black slave fights alongside Mel's white boys in order to win his freedom — even though, if you're interested in freedom for blacks, you'd have been better off signing up with the Brits, or at any rate, after Mel and his chums won the war, cutting your losses and escaping to Canada. No matter. Getting the blacks on Mel's side means that the family wedding can be held in an African-Arneri- can coastal community under the stars with laid-back percussive soul for the dance music: whether uptight white colonists of the 1770s would have been interested in grooving around like some Club Med beach party is neither here nor there.
And then there's the British. Mel's been fighting them for so long now, it's getting hard to come up with new atrocities. Here they burn entire church congregations alive — not something the British went in for, though the Nazis did it and that's close enough for historical authenticity. The nearest thing to a sympathetic Brit is, of all people, Lord Cornwallis (Tom Wilkinson). Whenever he appears, you want to shout, 'The British are slumming!' He fusses about the size of his epaulets for the ball, deplores the way you can't get a decent tai- lor, and generally finds the peasants are revolting. But he's the benign face of British tyranny, and, in terms of chastising our Mel, Cornwallis is the better half of a good fop/bad fop routine with snooty English Colonel William Tavington (Jason Isaacs), who likes nothing better than shooting small children in the back.
Now obviously Mel can keep doing this kind of stuff till he's 120. In his next film, I gather he plays Mahatma Gandhi, just a regular working stiff who realises his cam- paign of non-violence isn't working out and so puts a sock down his loincloth and takes Delhi single-handed, where Lord Mount- batten (played by the guy from Are You Being Served?) eventually surrenders, but not until Gandhi has taken Edwina (Drew Barrymore) back to his bed of nails. Work- ing title: Mad Mahat.
But I think the British objectors to Mel's travesty are slightly missing the point. The Brits have got history coming out their ass, and if Hollywood wants to appropriate a chunk or two for their own moronic pur- poses, who cares? Cornwallis is a peripher- al figure in British history. But he's central to America's, a key figure in the struggle to found the Republic. The people who ought to be insulted by this film are the Ameri- cans, whose Revolutionary War has been reduced to an idiotic cartoon. It wasn't about church burnings or slavery: it arose because the colonies were struggling against an overbearing central government that believed in high taxation to redis- tribute to favoured client groups. On the other hand, that sounds unnerving,ly like an Al Gore administration. Maybe it's easier to blame a lot of toff sadists.
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