BRAVEHEART
A film review by Ralph Benner
Copyright 1996 Ralph Benner
You gotta give to Mel Gibson what he deserves -- a movie Hall of Shame award for having his publicity machine spend $25 million dollars to buy ten Oscar nominations (including best makeup!) for a movie that, thrice at the box office gate, only collected a domestic total of something around $70 million, the same amount he spent to make his blooded-up poem of an epic, one that's progressively more gruesome and childish to sit through as the minutes turn into almost three hours. BRAVEHEART, about Sir William Wallace, the 13th Century Scottish renegade lionized as the heroic impetus for Scotland's freedom from England's tyranny, looks like it was no picnic to make, and, for all but his beer guzzling, blood thirsty compadres, it's not a whole lot of fun to watch. It's a militia instructional manual -- directed by Rambo of Scots.
As with Spain's Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, about whom little is known except legend born out of the anonymously written "Cantar de mio Cid," Wallace's place in Scottish history is dependent upon a poem written by Scotsman Henry the Minstrel some two hundred years after Wallace's death. Historians are in agreement that the author lacks the foundation to build but a mythical monument, yet, witness the examples, a lack of fact has never stopped a nation from veneration. History accepts, however, that Wallace was the driving force behind Scotland's revolt against the English, and the following accounts in BRAVEHEART are factual occurrences: that Wallace defeated the British at Stirling Bridge and sacked Edward I's northern-most outposts; that Wallace was defeated at Falkirk; and that, after exiling to France for an unknown period, Wallace returned, was captured by Sir John de Menteith, was tried, convicted and executed. Everything else in the movie, except for the presence of the English king and his gay son Edward II, is fictional filler.
The movie's structure has SPARTACUS branded all over it, especially the presentation of the armies and their anxious biding before combat. On more than one occasion we're reminded of Kirk Douglas, only here Wallace has been updated to Sylvester Stallone: when shouting from atop his horse, Gibson (unintentionally) sounds like him, packing the same fake, butch frenzy. I think this is where the movie gets into trouble: borrowing his hair from the prairie rat in THE ROAD WARRIOR and his war paint from RAMBO, something phooey is being dispatched -- a village people's "Macho Man" gung ho that displaces the Rodrigo chivalry. If some of us can't suspend disbelief long enough to get passed his poor Scotsspeak, or get passed the fact that's he's too contemporary a famous figure to become history, I can't accept that it's our fault: a more discriminating director would have scaled back the cheap plugs and steals and enfantilism (sic). And is there any other box office idol more in love with his own bare ass? Is his eager display a pitch for the virtues of sodomy? Or a way to avoid the fact that he's boxed himself in, hoping we don't recognize that he's not exercising enough as an actor? That he's vegging in his second childhood? There's a rigged effort to deemphasize Gibson's comely appeal in BRAVEHEART while at the same time baiting us -- Quick, find me in that chorus line of frontal nudity. His famous flirtatious "on the couch" charm hasn't much of a place on the hills of Scotland, yet the bloody and painted face is a new criterion for barbarous sensuality -- he's a visual primer for a Stallone course about T.E. Lawrence as warrior of darkness. It's repulsive, but considering the current hunger for carnage, some will get their kicks. It's what those Oscar noms represent.
Rod Lurie blurbs that BRAVEHEART is "one of the best films I've ever seen...the most sumptuous and involving historical epic since David Lean's LAWRENCE OF ARABIA." What total bull shit. Photographed by John Troll, BRAVEHEART has an Argus-eyed ambiance, with the same overcast picturesqueness as ROB ROY. (Consider ourselves fortunate that neither is as cloudy, misty, hazy as THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS or 1492: CONQUEST OF PARADISE. Only the meteorologists earned their pay on those foggers.) Raves about the battle scenes too -- "Some of the most vivid ever filmed...The most spectacular battle scenes ever." Vivid they're not and what's spectacular about them is the breakneck speed of the editing. During the Stirling Bridge battle, the images warp by us so fast that they're almost blurry and we're watching in busy fashion, hoping to catch at least half of what's going on. The plunges, stabbings, chops, slices and decapitations whiz by in both this sequence and at Falkirk, so we're spared spurts of blood and splatterings of innards. Yet we're removed from the suffering; we just sit there viewing the aftermath, wonder more about what hell the horses might have gone through. (According to NBC's Dateline, not much.) Gibson standing in the middle of the dead and half-living is meant to cause grief and revulsion, like Kenneth Branagh's slow-motion staging walloped us in HENRY V. Yet Branagh's futility of war isn't Gibson's Spartacus-like call for freedom at any price; becoming selective about emotions, Gibson posits that body counts (and torture) equal heroism.
Lifting the "let my people go" from SPARTACUS, appropriating the gallantry of EL CID and, given the repeated treacheries, foisting itself off partly as a sort of darkened, humorless LION IN WINTER, Randall Wallace's script concocts scenarios more fitting a rigger than legendary liberator: the ladies are eager to disrobe, a ghostly wife relieves the pain of martyrdom, an unwilling Judas becomes Braveheart's champion. Wallace manages to work in "fock," the original Scottish spelling and pronunciation of that more famous four letter expletive. One problem: though the Scots were probably the first to use the slang pejoratively, it wasn't in use until the 15th Century. Another problem: GLAADers are up in armed purses again over Gibson's homophobia, this time protesting BRAVEHEART because of the treatment of Edward I's son Edward II. They're onto something still unexpressed: Gibson, so quick to flaunt his pretty little ass on the big screen, has stereotypic views on gays -- he's the kind of Roman Catholic who notices not the priests ogling the alter boys but only the flaming hairdressers -- and he's brought his prejudices to Eddie 2, who, played by an actor who could be Rachel Ward's brother, is a swish weakling. But would Edward II have betrayed his arranged-for bride (Sophie Marceau, wearing a headdress that, under the crown, looks like white cerebra) at the very point of taking wedding vows? In front of his father? Patently foolish, this corrupt character establishment is for the unsophisticated Oscar voter; its message is that even royal homos, of whom history knows many, are contemptible lowlifes. (Quite a few, including Alexander the Great and Richard the Lionheart, were anything but.) GLAADers are also upset that junior's lover gets it, but, breaching my libertarianism, I found the lover's exit the movie's one amusing and best-directed interior shot. Additionally, and very clumsily, director Gibson gets swept away by masochistic intent over content: the Christ-like torture sequence has the obligatory Inquisitional flavor -- complete with its own combo of Basil Rathbone and Vincent Price -- but the crowd's reactions are mood alteringly inappropriate; there are too many "Look, Ma, I'm in this here movie" grins. Yet such errors earn Best Film Editing nominations.
Gibson is WYSIWYG, seemingly so uncomplicated that, until now, it's been just about impossible not to like him. We've overlooked his lack of finesse, his apparently convenient lack of tolerance about what the real world is made up of, because once he flashes that smile, or locks onto us with those eyes, we're wasted: we all become Sigourney Weaver's Jill in THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY. Even his Pizzahead in THE MAN WITHOUT A FACE disarms. Gibson's directorial debut, FACE is a much better directed movie than BRAVEHEART. A proud dad of (is it?) six, he knows the wandering adventures, use of forbidden language, insensitivities, the instant querulous eruptions of kids. As director, he appears to know the ill-effects of falsifying otherwise innocent situations: if FACE has the depressing moralistic posturing of Diane Keaton's THE GOOD MOTHER -- that sometimes truth isn't enough to open the minds of Philistines -- it's also a reminder that children are used to shield adults from the fear of truth. (In America, we're more afraid of what is true than the Judeo-Christian belief of damnation for breaking the 9th Commandment.) The way Gibson handles the subject matter that inevitably springs up is evidence of sensitivity to society's punishing hypocrisies; it confirms he's got a golden heart. What angers many of us about Gibson's choices of movies is that he so frequently retreats from humanity. As if he's afraid of losing his kinship with his fellow prankster buddies in the audience. No longer a theory, Gibson's popularity among men isn't based on his comic lunacy and sport -- these are his least worthy attributes -- but on tantalizing solicitation, something resembling a subliminal communal desideratum. While the growing numbers of sexually insecure American men would balk with faked hostility at the suggestion, how else do they explain male movie makers exploiting his Nautilized gluteus maximus? Strictly for the distaffers? Demographics are well known: the majority of those seeing the LETHAL WEAPON pukers, and most especially in repeats, are blue collar swains, so whose secret reveries are being teasingly fed? Gibson elicits these feelings, he knows it, and his public denials are disguised conceit. He told Larry King that he'd like to return to Shakespeare, perhaps on stage, and play Iago in "Othello." With his penchant for making villainous mock out of inverts, what would he do to the Bard's murderous coxcomb? Many of us want to believe some of Gibson's material is method towards aesthetics. That the highs -- from THE ROAD WARRIOR to LIVING DANGEROUSLY to MRS. SOFFEL to HAMLET to WITHOUT A FACE to looking more stunning in kilt on Jay Leno than any Scot I've ever seen -- are indications that a doctrine of artistry is being strived for. But then the money making juvenilia -- lows that have eventually done in every other superstar. (Just ask Burt Reynolds.) And, apparently, Gibson's agreeable to stumping so low as to purchase a flock of undeserving awards nominations. Like it did with Shirley MacLaine for TERMS OF ENDURANCE and Clint Eastwood for UNFORGIVEN, Hollywood may decide to honor Gibson with awards he doesn't artistically earn just to shut him up. The 1995 Oscar nominations recall those of 1988. Foofs blame the FISH CALLED WANDA voting block for the foul smell winners generated that year. Some insiders think THE POSTMAN has the surging dark horse gallop to surpass the competition. Others think APOLLO 13 will be Opie's lucky number. If not, then 1995 will have the smell of BRAVEFART.
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