The Patriot (2000)

Official trailer

The Patriot is a Roland Emmerich film about the American Revolutionary War starring Mel Gibson.

That sentence describes most of what works and most of what doesn’t. Gibson plays Benjamin Martin, a South Carolina plantation owner and veteran of the French and Indian War who has sworn off fighting until British dragoons murder his son. He raises a militia. He fights a guerrilla war against the British. He eventually meets his nemesis, Colonel Tavington, on the field at Cowpens. Heath Ledger plays his eldest son Gabriel.

Jason Isaacs plays Tavington. Joely Richardson plays his late wife’s sister.

The film is a hundred and sixty-four minutes of well-made revolutionary war spectacle that’s also a serious problem as history. Both things are true at once. The Patriot keeps me entertained for all hundred and sixty-four minutes and irritated for most of them. The battles thrill me and Isaacs is a treat to hate, and then the film paints its hero’s plantation as a happy place for free laborers and I want to throw something at the screen.

What Works

The battle sequences are excellent. Emmerich knows how to stage large-scale action, and the Battle of Camden is shot with attention to the real tactics of eighteenth-century line infantry: the musket volleys, the reloading, the bayonet charges. The film teaches the audience how Revolutionary War battles worked, and most films about the period skip that. I could watch those lines of infantry trade volleys all afternoon.

Gibson is good in his most violent tone.

The fight in the woods where he kills Tavington’s dragoons with a tomahawk while his sons watch is among the most disturbing things in Gibson’s filmography. That’s saying something, and that scene is the reason I rate his work here so high. Heath Ledger gives a textured supporting performance. Jason Isaacs makes Tavington magnetically evil in a way that the script doesn’t entirely deserve but needs, and I enjoy hating him.

The History Problem

Benjamin Martin is a composite of several real South Carolina militia leaders, most prominently Francis Marion. The historical Marion was a slaveholder. He committed atrocities against Cherokee civilians during the French and Indian War. The Patriot scrubs all of this. Martin’s plantation runs on free black laborers who, the film implies, are happy to be there. This is a heavy historical lie, and it’s the part of the film I can’t forgive.

Tavington is based on Banastre Tarleton, a British cavalry officer who was indeed brutal but who didn’t, for instance, herd civilians into a church and burn them alive, which Tavington does in the film. The script invents German-occupation-era atrocities for its eighteenth-century antagonist because the script wants the audience to want him dead. The British press objected loudly to the portrayal. Their objections are reasonable.

The Family

The family scenes are stronger than the script needs them to be. The seven children. The dead wife. The brother-in-law. The household is a working economic unit, which most films set in this period don’t get right. Children of the period worked alongside their parents because the household was a small business. The film shows this.

Ledger and Gibson have real chemistry as father and son. The middle section, where Gabriel returns from the army wounded and the family hides him, is the best sustained drama in the film, and I think Ledger does his best work in it. The conflict between father and son about whether to fight gets more nuance than the marketing suggested.

Is The Patriot worth watching?

8/10 as cinema. 4/10 as history. The action is excellent, the family material works, and Gibson, Ledger and Isaacs are all strong, so the entertainment justifies the 8 on its own. What keeps me from going higher is the scrubbed history, a deliberate choice that turns a slaveholder’s stand-in into a saint, and I think the filmmakers knew exactly what they were doing. Watch it knowing what it’s doing.

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