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Bloody history is spattered with brilliance
By Mike Clark, USA TODAY
The rap on past Revolutionary War movies (mostly box office flops) is that they've
brandished the wrong kind of red: cheek rouge on effete wearers of wigs.
In contrast, The Patriot ( out of four) is as effete as a cannonball. Its red is the
blood of South Carolina militiamen - farmers, shopkeepers and ministers - people's
patriots whose heads and limbs get blown up and sliced off by those bloody (in both
senses) British.
Exactly five Fourth of Julys after Braveheart, Mel Gibson is back in a viscerally
historical event movie, one in which the lines of two hugely symbolic years (1776 and
2000) have intersected in a marketer's dream. The payoff: no classic, but a more
accomplished example of historical storytelling than Gladiator.
If all you want is a rousing, patriotic holiday experience with Mel in good form (and why
not?), this is a far better bet than passing out on Bloody Marys at your neighbor's
cookout. But if you have loftier expectations, forewarned is forearmed.
The movie deals in broad strokes, which certainly befits a Revolutionary War revenge piece
directed by Independence Day's Roland Emmerich. So you want to motivate Gibson's
reluctant Benjamin Martin character (widowed father of seven) to take up arms against the
British? Have a dastardly British colonel (Jason Isaacs) shoot one of his children
point-blank.
You want to grab an audience's attention for 2 3/4 hours by making textbook pages breathe?
Give them the incomparable Caleb Deschanel photographing mansions burning, muzzles loading
and a British ship blowing up as Gen. Cornwallis (Tom Wilkinson, with welcome nuance and
subtlety) looks on at an oceanside garden party.
Yet while its elaborate battle scenes will likely spark both enthusiasm and ridicule, the
movie occasionally tempers its bombast to more lasting effect. When Martin pours out
regrets to his eldest son (played in winning hunk style by Heath Ledger) or amusingly
one-ups Cornwallis, the film feels like the product of a capable screenwriter (it is: Saving
Private Ryan's Robert Rodat). But when Emmerich goes over the top in some of the
action sequences, it looks like someone has studied slow-motion clichés in correspondence
school.
Violent, and appropriately so, the film surprises a little by displaying gore discipline:
It consistently cuts away after a second or two. For that reason (and the absence of sex
and profanity), this speedily told story about events that still matter might make a
better bet for intelligent 12-and-ups than a lot of movies around.
Ironically, certain plot lines recall James Stewart's 1965 Civil War drama, Shenandoah
- a popular movie in its day but not one with much shelf life. It, too, was excessive (in
sentimental terms, though, not one-man-against-all heroics) in a way that cheapened the
material.
Emmerich might have had a masterpiece, but he'll have to settle for what comes close to
being a must-see movie today. Like a good firecracker, The Patriot makes a big
bang - then it's over. (R: strong war violence)
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