#429: Braveheart
Who needs historical accuracy when you have American nationalist propaganda?
Initial release: 1995
Director: Mel Gibson
Braveheart is one of those movies that occupy a huge place in pop culture in the way a lot of films of the 1990s do. I remember when it had just come out, and there was something of a big surge in interest in Scottish history, even among people who didn’t have a drop of Scottish in their ancestry; it’s even been credited with giving new life to the Scottish independence movement.
And why not? It’s a beautiful blend of action, drama and violence, paced just so to keep the audience hooked throughout its three-hour runtime. It’s primed to serve as entertainment-cum-propaganda, much in the way that Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan would in 1998.
But here’s the thing: what audience is this film serving as propaganda for? That’s easy: it ain’t the Scottish. It’s Americans.
To be sure, this is a very Scottish movie about Scots in Scotland, nevermind that the positively decrepit Mel Gibson, far too old for the role even by the standards of the film’s timeline, is an American-Australian putting on an atrocious Scottish accent, to say nothing of the abundance of English, Irish and Scottish actors all playing each others’ respective nationalities. Gibson is William Wallace, a legendary Scottish hero who participated in a war for Scottish independence in the middle ages; though he begins the film reluctant to fight, the murder of his wife in retaliation for fighting off the English soldiers attempting to rape her leads him to start a rebellion that begins to spread across Scotland and eventually into England, ultimately resulting in Wallace’s death and stepping into history.
Braveheart is a decent enough film in its technical aspects. The story and characterization are compelling in that simple way that Gibson would use to great effect in The Patriot; despite a slow start, once the film gets into its stride the pacing is such that they make you wait until the halfway point for the iconic Battle of Stirling sequence and you won’t even notice. Gibson’s got an eye for how camera angles tell stories, always making Wallace seem larger than life while King Edward Longshanks is rarely given anything more than a straight-on angle. But that’s about where the film’s successes end. Except for the general details of Wallace’s role in the war for independence, the film is almost a complete fiction. Anachronisms, mischaracterizations and technical mistakes abound; none of it actually matters, as it was all purposely done for the sake of drama. There’s a lot of guff about “liberty” and “freedom,” with lots of pithy quotes from Gibson’s Wallace, real stirring stuff like “Every man dies, not every man lives.” Bracingly sage! It seems like an early warning sign of Gibson’s slow descent from washed-up 80s action hero to crumbling tradcath embarrassment.
In fact, all of the elements of Gibson’s hyper-violent Catholic propaganda piece The Passion Of The Christ are in Braveheart: scenes of intense violence, a general disregard for historical accuracy, a stereotype-filled demonizing of the villain’s entire identity to the point of xenophobia, and an overlong focus on the lead character’s suffering.
Regardless of what effect the film may have had on Scottish politics, its effect on American audiences, hungry for nationalist fervor in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet union, can be seen in the post-9/11 era today. Gibson’s blue-painted face is an unmistakable symbol of the film’s dog-whistle politics; Republicans have seen themselves in the movie for years. when Donald Trump was first running for president, some pundits breathlessly compared his campaign to that of William Wallace’s in the film. QAnon-cultist actor and Gibson pal Jim Caviezel deliberately invoked the film in a speech to his fellow conspiracists. In short: Braveheart is a film for reactionaries, by reactionaries; that it achieved a level of popularity with a 90s audience the way Red Dawn did in the 80s says more about us than about the quality of these films.
But hey — at least Scottish independence might be a thing someday soon.
