8 / 10
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 actual 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.
For Writers
An antagonist needs to be more interesting than the protagonist for any revenge film to work. Tavington is what drives The Patriot. Without him, Benjamin Martin is a man with a tragic backstory. With him, Benjamin Martin is a man with a target. The lesson is that revenge stories live or die by their antagonists. The protagonist’s grief is generic. The antagonist’s specific cruelty makes the revenge feel necessary. Spend your writing time on the villain.
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 military has objected publicly to the portrayal. Their objections are reasonable.
For Writers
Historical fiction that inflates the antagonist’s evil while sanitizing the protagonist’s morally compromised reality is the most common form of historical dishonesty. The Patriot does both. It makes Tavington into a Nazi while making Benjamin Martin into a saint. The lesson is that inventing crimes for a real-or-real-derived figure is a serious choice. It’s sometimes justified. It’s more often the writer’s laziness. If you can’t make the audience hate your antagonist using what happened, you haven’t yet found the story.
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.
For Writers
A family in a historical drama works best when the drama shows the household as a working economic unit instead of as a modern nuclear family in costume. The Patriot gets this right in the home scenes. The children have jobs. The household produces. The brother-in-law has standing because his economic contribution to the operation is visible. The lesson is that pre-modern families were structured around production. Write them that way and the period feels right.
Craft Note
Roland Emmerich directed. Robert Rodat wrote. Mel Gibson as Benjamin Martin. Heath Ledger as Gabriel Martin. Jason Isaacs as Colonel William Tavington. Joely Richardson as Charlotte Selton. Chris Cooper as Colonel Burwell. Tcheky Karyo as Major Jean Villeneuve. Tom Wilkinson as General Cornwallis. Released June 2000. Approximately one hundred and ten million dollar budget. Two hundred and fifteen million worldwide gross. John Williams scored. Loosely based on Francis Marion, Daniel Morgan, Andrew Pickens, and Thomas Sumter.
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.
