Braveheart

Rating

Director

Mel Gibson

Screenplay

Randall Wallace

Length

177 min.

Starring

Mel Gibson, James Robinson, Sean Lawlor, Sandy Nelson, James Cosmo, Sean McGinley, Alan Tall, Andrew Weir, Gerda Stevenson, Brian Cox, Sophie Morceau, Stephen Billington, Angus Macfadyen, Catherine McCormack, Brendan Gleeson, Tommy Flangan

MPAA Rating

R (For brutal medieval warfare)

Review

When actors direct films, there’s often some ego involved. After all, they were once or still are well known celebrities with something to prove. Braveheart is such a vanity project that fails on a number of significant levels.

Mel Gibson, along with directing the film, stars as freedom fighter William Wallace. When Wallace was a child, his brother and father are killed in a fight against the English. After growing up, he meets a girl he knew from his childhood who is later raped and killed by the English. Wallace then begins a crusade to liberate Scotland from the English.

Braveheart plods along like most war films do. It is here we’re also introduced to Gibson’s penchant for blood and gore. While I have no problem with realism, what is included in this film amounts to little more than violence for violence’s sake. Is there something about Gibson that drives him to such bloody topics. This was his debut film. It received the Academy Award for Best Picture against all logic. It’s the most violent film ever to win such an honor and we’ve seen films like Platoon and The Godfather take Best Picture. Some violence is sufficient, but this film takes it to an extreme.

In addition to the overly visceral nature of the movie, Braveheart rewrites a good portion of history. History is prone to embellishment especially when heroism is involved. However, historians have pointed out a significant number of inaccuracies in the film, one of which further hinders the film. Edward Longshanks’ son is portrayed as a homosexual whose lover is thrown from a window by Edward. History suggests that his son was not gay at all. This should give the audience cause to wonder why Gibson portrayed him as such. Was it because he has an aversion to homosexuality and wanted to mistreat it in his film? Is it that he is secretly gay himself and is using it to try and cover up his Catholic guilt? No one will likely ever know for sure, but whatever the reason, it’s a disgusting bit of historical variance that acts as a significant disservice to the film.

The script by Randall Wallace can be blamed for some of the inaccuracies, though there is enough blame to pass to Wallace. The characters are all two-dimensional with only William Wallace left to add some depth. However, through Gibson’s vainglorious performance, it’s hard to see him as more than the paper thin characters around him. We have no one but him to “root for” throughout the film. It becomes increasingly tiresome when there’s hardly thirty minutes in the whole three hour experience devoted to exposition and character development.

Braveheart is the worst film ever to win the Oscar for Best Picture. With 1995 exhibiting such fine films as Babe, Leaving Las Vegas and Dead Man Walking, it’s hard to imagine the Academy picking such a bloody, regressive and pedantic picture for its top award. History shows they did and we’re saddled with that choice. I dislike the film significantly; however, audiences still seem to love it. It’s the kind of film that audiences find engrossing because it’s simple and violent.

Braveheart‘s popularity is a symptom of a greater problem: how audiences can adore such obviously weak pictures. Give them the right visual stimuli and they’ll clamor for more. Provide them with anything remotely literate or intelligent and they tend to shy away. A rare film will come along that’s literate, intelligent and popular. Braveheart is definitely not that film.

Review Written

January 8, 2007