It’s been a while since we’ve talked Mel Gibson, who after all has seen largely to keep behind the camera these days. Ironically bizarre racial rants on camera are more of a thing now but I digress. Despite being nuttier than a squirrel dancing on top of a pile of macadamia nuts, there was a time when he managed to keep that under wraps, and arguably that peak was back in the nineties—when new kinds of historical (or, well, historically-themed anyway) epics were coming in, from Last of the Mohicans to today’s topic, Braveheart. From Oscars to the box office, it did well enough for itself, but how does it hold up?
Well, from the get-go we have our confirmation that this is about as related to actual events as Saving Private Ryan if it had ended with Tom Hanks suddenly fighting Hitler piloting a giant robot spider. There’s rambling about the ‘cruel pagan kind of England’ (when what pagan rulers remained in Europe were a handful in the Baltic region, if that), and being introduced to our William Wallace character as played by Gibson, who is just a salt of the earth villager, don’t you know, as opposed to being a minor noble and of himself. So, er, don’t show this in history class.
From a technical standpoint, Braveheart isn’t bad or anything—but it is very, very on the nose. To a borderline absurd degree, in fact. The Scottish are humble village folk, and so they live in tiny little hamlets with houses almost made out of mud, and lords practice pseudo historical ‘prima noctae’ which actually embedded that myth enough that governments had to respond to it. Edward I is an evil overlord for whom the film makes up acts and attitudes as if he’s out of a bad fantasy novel—though there were certainly cruelties he did like acts to expel Jews that aren’t mentioned here. I wonder why Gibson overlooked that.
And so it goes on—Sophie Marceau plays Isabella of France, whose life could warrant a whole movie unto itself, but of course swoons for our Wallace’s ruggedness or something. Angus McFayden is Robert the Bruce whose portrayal actually irked some Scots with him playing second fiddle and dancing around his loyalties, and let’s not get into Peter Hanley as the evil effeminate Edward II. I wonder why Gibson went with that too.
But never mind artistic licenses, hell, Hollywood and pretty much everyone else does that all the time, right? Even so, just judging it on pure entertainment, everything feels once again just a little bit too exaggerated—there’s the Battle of Stirling Bridge with its evil sneering English commanders who bombard their own men with arrows because, well, that’s what too much Earl Grey and Jeremy Clarkson does to you or something! Wallace’s army feels more like a summer camp until it becomes super effective, and so on. It’s not terrible per se, but especially now it all feels cartoony regardless of the details.
There was another nineties film before this which was also a historically-themed epic with a wide cast—Robin Hood Prince of Thieves, and you know what, I prefer that one. It wasn’t remotely trying to be any kind of real historical portrayal, and while yes Kevin Costner awkwardly bumbles his way through the lead role, we at least had Morgan Freeman and Alan Rickman for some bona fide entertaining performances. Most importantly, it dispensed with strange directorial obsessions and just focused on being a fun romp—imperfect as it was, I still lean to it way more than this.
Gibson of course a few years later took things further with The Patriot, which was the same basic thing with his ahistorical humble farmer rising up to innovate the art of killing Englishmen. Eventually, of course, in the 2000s he moved on to grittier projects like Passion of the Christ, which framed a key religious story about how much buckets of blood got splattered on the ground, and Apocalypto, which is a whole other can of worms. There’s always debate about separating art from artist, and it all depends on context, but in this case, you still can’t avoid the artist’s overindulgence.
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