The Patriot
Place on List:
III. Period: 1960 - 2009
2.
Primary Texts: Film
Roland
Emmerich. The
Patriot.
(2000)
Key Terms (tags): film, period, united
states, american revolution, historical
Supporting References:
http://go.galegroup.com.libproxy.cc.stonybrook.edu/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CCX3454900492&v=2.1&u=sunysb&it=r&p=GVRL&sw=w
“FILMS OF THE
AMERICAN REVOLUTION. Whether set in the ancient Mediterranean or
a galaxy far away, war has provided one of the great themes of
feature films. In American history the Civil War, the two
twentieth-century world wars, and Vietnam all have inspired films of
the highest level of achievement, both in terms of cinema and the
popular reconstruction of the American past. The Revolutionary War is
at least a partial exception. It has generated perhaps ten feature
films of note, from D. W. Griffith's America (1924) to Robert
Emmerich's The Patriot (2000). Most have serious flaws,
whether artistic, historical, or both. Like virtually all historical
fiction, they are as much concerned with issues current at the time
of their own making as with recreating the verifiable past.
“America
has not attracted as much attention as Griffith's first great
feature, The Birth of a Nation (1915), or his attempt to make
up for that film's vicious racism, Intolerance (1916). That is
unfortunate, because it deserves wider attention within his body of
work. Its budget was enormous for the day ($950,000), and its
production values were high. Griffith never balked at large themes,
and the film includes recreations of Lexington and Concord, the
Declaration of Independence, and the Continental Army's bleak winter
at Valley Forge. It employs the spectacular sets, battalions of
extras, and color-washed film stock that were Griffith's hallmarks.
But, setting a precedent that subsequent productions would follow,
the film centers its treatment of the whole Revolution on a family
melodrama, involving an ordinary Patriot man and an aristocratic
woman. Here, as in films to come, the interplay of class and sex is
complicated by the Loyalist leanings of the woman's father.
“John Ford considered the process and
the meaning of American history throughout a career that stretched
from the silents to the sixties. He turned to the Revolution in 1939
with Drums Along the Mohawk, starring Henry Fonda and
Claudette Colbert, based on Walter D. Edmonds's novel of the same
name (1936). Edmonds had researched the revolutionary Mohawk Valley
carefully, and his long tale depicted a biracial society tearing
itself apart. Ford had high production values, including expensive
Technicolor and location work in Idaho, but Drums was no Gone
with the Wind. His best meditations on American history
(Stagecoach [1939], My Darling Clementine [1946], The
Searchers [1956]) emerged as he expanded skimpy stories. With
Drums his problem was to condense a very large text to normal
feature length.
“The result is a film framed in terms
of a "natural" conflict between Indians and settlers.
Britain is hardly mentioned. The Indians are manipulated by a
villainous Loyalist (John Carradine), whose place as the only
significant white on their side is balanced by the one Indian among
the whites (Chief Big Tree). In an echo of the Griffith film, Gil
Martin (Fonda) is an ordinary man who has married a rich woman, Lana
(Colbert). She has followed him to the frontier and must learn the
frontier's ways; in the process, they experience a profound exchange
of roles. The film deals with battle twice. The first time, Gil
describes its horrors to Lana as she tends his wounds. His tale is
loosely based on the Patriots' ambush by a force of British,
Loyalists, and natives at Oriskany in 1777. The second battle is a
siege of a fort. Ford realized it in starkly sexual terms of white
women threatened with rape, and it ends as Continental troops
"literally run" to the rescue.
“A year later Frank Lloyd directed
Cary Grant in The Howards of Virginia. Critic Pauline Kael
described the urbane, English-born Grant's performance as Matt
Howard, a buckskin-clad surveyor who marries an aristocratic woman,
as "really bad." Matt Howard joins the revolutionary
struggle, which, as in Drums, is shown in terms of frontier
conflict—though Lloyd puts more stress than does Ford on the clash
of Loyalists and Patriots among whites. Footage from Drums Along
the Mohawk, including battle sequences, was used in 1956 in
Mohawk, directed by Kurt Neumann. That film's one merit is
that it renders its native characters as complex and divided, rather
than as faceless forest horrors.
“Walt Disney's production of Johnny
Tremain (1957), based on the novel by Esther Forbes, was made for
Disney's mid-twentieth-century family audience. Director Robert
Stevenson clearly had a low budget, and most of the film was shot on
the Disney lot under warm Southern California skies. But allowing for
those constraints and for a certain degree of melodrama, the film
does a remarkably thorough, if pedestrian, job of showing the
revolutionary crisis in Boston. In this it holds true to Forbes's
intention to provide an introduction to the Revolution for young
readers.
“Like Walter Edmonds, Forbes had done
her historical homework. The film does give a good sense of tiny,
crowded eighteenth-century Boston, of the events leading up to the
destruction of the East India Company's tea in December 1773, of Paul
Revere's ride to warn that the regulars were marching to Concord the
following April, and of the battle that followed. It also gives windy
speeches to some Patriot leaders and renders British General Thomas
Gage (Ralph Clanton) as more a victim of bureaucracy than a villain
in his own right. The villain, instead, is a pompous Loyalist
merchant, an uncle of the title character. Johnny (Hal Stalmaster)
rejects his uncle along with his family's inherited wealth and
reactionary politics. As the Patriot army's campfires ring besieged
Boston, Gage has almost the last word, admitting that an idea, not
mere rebelliousness, has driven his opponents to war.
“Hugh Hudson's Revolution
(1986) is Johnny Tremain's direct opposite in almost all
respects. Hudson had established himself as a major director with
Chariots of Fire (1981). Working with a huge budget, he chose
to do location work in Britain, reasoning that the hungry look of
ordinary English people under Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher would
show something of the suffering of Americans under George III. The
idea was intriguing, but it failed. One reason is the locations. The
English sky and trees and fields simply do not look at all like
America. A major battle sequence shows a British armada invading New
York City in 1776. Much of the battle takes place in a field yellow
with ripe rape (canola), a sight familiar to any summer traveler in
England but unknown on the American east coast. The sequence
completely misses the near-entrapment of the American troops on
Brooklyn Heights and Washington's brilliant nighttime withdrawal to
Manhattan. The film closes with the siege of Lord Cornwallis's
emplacement at Yorktown, which it presents as simply a melee. Once
again, there are problems of location, with the final shots taking
place at the bottom of a steep, rocky cliff. Nothing of the sort
exists on the shores of Chesapeake Bay. In between there is a long
sequence at Valley Forge, which the film shows as a fort defending
itself against British raiders rather than as the winter encampment
that it actually was.
“Revolution also uses the
device of a rich young woman (Nastassja Kinski) falling in love with
a poor man (Al Pacino). Her father is a double-dealing business man,
looking for profit on both sides, but she emerges as a fiery Patriot.
The film reprises several devices from Drums Along the Mohawk.
One is to have her listen to his tale of combat when she finds him
wounded after the first battle. Another is to dress her in a
soldier's blue coat and make her an active participant in the action
at Valley Forge, where she appears to be killed by British troops as
she is driving a wagon laden with wounded soldiers. Several
coincidences later, Pacino's character finds her alive.
“Hudson's own Labor Party sympathies
are apparent. At worst, this leads to a caricature of the British
forces. Soldiers in the ranks, represented by a loutish sergeant
major (Donald Sutherland), are brutal. Officers are not just
aristocratic but effete, to the point of outright camp. Pacino's male
lead enters the film completely without knowledge or motivation. That
could be forgiven for the youthful Johnny Tremain in the Disney
production, whose function is to introduce issues to young, naïve
viewers. But for an adult in 1776, such ignorance is unbelievable.
But despite these flaws, Hudson's approach has merits. The happy,
totally unlikely union of the Kinski and Pacino characters takes
place not in the midst of sunshine-soaked triumph but under a cloud
of bitter realization of the price of revolution and the problems to
come. Patriot soldiers realize that speculators have cheated them out
of what they had been promised. Emergent racism is evident among the
victorious white Americans against both native peoples and
African-Americans. Pacino's final voice-over is optimistic, but the
final images and sounds give reason to doubt.
“Emmerich's The Patriot is
equally lavish and equally flawed. Unlike Revolution, the
location work is right. The film is set in South Carolina and was
shot there as well. The two major sequences of formal battle, based
on the conflicts at Camden (1781) and Guilford Court House (1782),
are very well done, though the film is no better than Johnny
Tremain at showing massed musket fire and bayonet charges. We
learn under the opening credits that it is autumn of 1776 and shortly
afterward that independence has not been declared. Like Pacino's Tom
Dodd in Revolution, Mel Gibson's Benjamin Martin is given no
motivation for joining the Revolution, until his own son is killed
when he encounters British wrath. Then Martin turns into a fury,
modeled loosely on the "Swamp Fox" guerrilla leader,
Francis Marion.
“In another predictably antiphonal
pairing, Gibson's Ben Martin finds his opposite number in Colonel
William Tavington (Jason Isaacs), who is based on the historic
cavalry commander Banastre Tarleton. The film perfectly captures
Tavington's image, derived from Sir Joshua Reynolds's portrait of
Tarleton. But Tavington is pure villain, and British reviewers were
rightly outraged that in the film he perpetrates an atrocity against
civilians that Tarleton never committed.
“In Roland Emmerich's 2000 film
about the American Revolution, Mel Gibson's Benjamin Martin (center)
is not motivated to join to the war effort until his own son has a
fatal encounter with the British.
“All of these films at least touch on
the issue of race, but The Patriot makes a great deal of it.
Unfortunately, it simply denies historical fact. Martin is a member
of the South Carolina elite, but he owns no slaves. The partisan
fighters who gather around Martin later in the film welcome and
respect Occam (Jay Arlen Jones), a black man who joins them and wins
his freedom. They find refuge in a slave maroon community, which
never would have welcomed whites. At the end Occam leads the
rebuilding of Martin's ravaged house. The film ignores the historical
record: that revolutionary white Carolinians stoutly resisted the
Revolution's opening to black freedom, that they kept the slave trade
going into the nineteenth century, and that their progeny would lead
the secession movement in 1861 so as to protect slavery.
“Mary Silliman's War, made for
PBS in 1994, is worlds apart from Hollywood films like The
Patriot. Based on a scholarly biography, by Joy Day Buel and
Richard V. Buel Jr., of an elite Connecticut woman whose husband,
Brigadier General Gold Selleck Silliman, was kidnapped by Loyalists,
it shows how war came to one Revolutionary community. Without grand,
heroic charges or powerful sound effects, the film gives a strong
sense of a community at odds with itself, of how British regular
soldiers dealt with civilians, and of how living through the war
changed one woman and her world.
“Both dramatically and historically,
the small-scale, small-screen film depicts the Revolution well. But
the subject still awaits a good, mass-viewer treatment that does not
do violence to the Revolution's history.”
Comments