Gay Today: Entertainment

The Patriot

Review By Jack Nichols

In The Patriot, Mel Gibson plays Benjamin Martin, a caring single dad and a reluctant 1776 militiaman after America's Revolutionary War heats up. Hollywood treats us, after too many years of absence from the topic, to a poignant, painful glimpse of the birth pangs of the good ol' USA. Plenty of gory battle scenes too with Gibson proudly carrying Old Glory into hell and thus confirming his citizenship beyond a doubt, even if he was reared in Australia.

Heath Ledger proves he's a box office heartthrob in the making in The Patriot

Mel Gibson, I can never seem to forget, once suddenly and publicly expressed his distaste for the thought of being anally penetrated. Thus, it seems, his return in The Patriot as a colonel to head the south's rowdy militias against the manicured English is perfectly understandable. Its this whole thing about not letting that effete enemy get behind you. A good strategist is one who watches his rear.

And, once again, brave hearted Mel ably plays a good military strategist. But it wasn't Mel for whom I lusted throughout this fast-moving three hour film. Sorry Mel. It was the actor who played your 20-something son, an angel in my heavenly book, and appropriately named Gabriel. His real name is Heath Ledger and he's sort-of a new boy in town...all the way from Australia. Congratulations Hollywood! You know eye candy when you see it.

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Gabriel wants to join the revolutionary army and fight the English head-on. Mel, his daddy, thinks its a bad idea. But when an English military villain blows one of his dear sons away and tries to hang the beautiful Gabriel, Mel loses it, or, shall we say, he gets with it. Either way, during a very graphic battle in the woods, twenty English "redcoats" pay with their lives for trying to escort Gabriel to the gallows.

Wanting to see an artful recreation—in 2000—of American life patterns in 1776—encouraged my seeing The Patriot in a theatre rather than waiting for the video. The script writer, Robert Rodat, has done a splendid job providing a subtly moving tribute to the only kind of patriotism worth crowing about: that which is willing to see the status quo changed for the better. Gabriel espouses this passion and looks forward to the creation of a new world.

The Patriot's battles, shown in their full fury, are fraught with all the stupidity of war itself. Gabriel realizes this as he prepares to return to the war but watches first from a far-off window as the musket-laden armies line up to take shots at each other.

Whether or not this film is—in every respect-- technically truthful about the birth of a nation seems somewhat immaterial to me. History, as we know it, is too often written by ax grinders wedded to the unholy trinity of ideology, speculation and rumor. But I think The Patriot somehow gets close to showing things that really happened.

However, Mel Gibson still has his sex appeal as an American revolutionary

What rings true about The Patriot most are the war-relevant issues it explores and the dramatic way in which it personalizes the earliest American struggle for political/personal independence— partly by encompassing the many individual motives that inspired militia men who sided with the rebellious colonists.

American history students will rush to see The Patriot, no doubt. But whoever simply wants to understand America's roots should hurry to the theatre first. These people will see—and perhaps appreciate—that our revolutionary forebears fought in the wilderness to be independent and to dream of and create their own futures.

As for the zeal of those revolutionaries, The Patriot dramatizes the first unwieldy steps taken in this, an “ongoing revolution,” which is what Adlai Stevenson called this fast-changing-ever-experiment we label America.