Cinema: A Cheer For Old Glory

It has everything you want in an epic: sweep, scope, wild reversals of fortune and plenty of bold, basic emotions. It offers a stalwart hero and a sneering villain, bloody battles and daring rescues, tender love, heedless cruelty and, above all, scores of attractive human beings who have pledged their lives, fortunes and sacred honor to a desperate but noble cause.

What's not to like about The Patriot? Well it certainly suffers from irony deficiency. It is four-square for democracy and decency, and this, of course, will cause a certain amount of superciliousness among the postmodernist swells. Since it is a story about the American Revolution, it will suffer from the age-old suspicion of movies in which guys wear knee britches and write with quill pens. But if the mass audience can get behind Gladiator, why shouldn't it take a flier on more recent history? You telling us Russell Crowe is cuter than Mel Gibson? Or in his picture suffers more than Gibson does? Get outta here.

Gibson is cast as a grieving widower named Benjamin Martin. In the French and Indian War he was a gallant, not to say legendary, commander, but something bad happened in its course--a preventable atrocity, we eventually learn--and he is determined to raise his numerous progeny in peace and prosperity on his South Carolina plantation. In the state assembly he votes against raising troops and money for a war of independence. This alienates his son Gabriel (charmingly played by Heath Ledger), who joins the Continental Army. And it reckons without the relentless cruelty of Colonel William Tavington (whom Jason Isaacs plays with ferocious candor, offering neither excuses nor a single redeeming grace).

One day, in hot pursuit of retreating rebel soldiers, Tavington comes riding up to Martin's plantation at the head of a cavalry troop. Insouciantly, even rather jauntily, he orders all the Americans--most of them wounded--to be shot, the plantation fired, and for good measure, he marches Gabriel (by this time a dispatch rider for the valiant Colonel Harry Burwell, played by Chris Cooper) off to be hanged. When one of Martin's other sons tries to rescue his brother, he is coldly murdered.

It is this psychopathy that begets Martin's patriotism. With two of his other boys, he rescues Gabriel from the hanging party in what is surely director Roland Emmerich's most dashing set piece. This action establishes Martin, whose character is surely based in part on Francis Marion, the not-as-nice "swamp fox" of the Revolution, as a great, almost ghostly guerrilla leader. Also, it personalizes the war for him. At some point, we know, he must confront the hateful Tavington mano a mano.