A young Wallace and his family, in the film, are poor farmers living in a Highland glen. If that were indeed true, then Braveheart has arguably the most realistic portrayal of Scots on film. If you’ve seen it, it may be because a “Since you liked Braveheart” algorithm silently guided you there.When one pictures a Scot, the image typically depicted is one of a working-class, kilt-wearing ruffian playing bagpipes. Instead, it had to settle for Robert the Bruce. Even more likely, it’d be a mediocre but well-enough-made miniseries on an obscure-ish cable channel you might not even know you’re paying for.Ī case in point: Just this year, in April, Macfadyen resumed his role as Robert the Bruce in a film that, with any justice would have been called Braveheart. Today’s Braveheart equivalent would be destined at best for a middling box office-or, at this point, a VOD release announced over high-frequency radio waves that only the fathers among us can hear. I’d kick it out of bed, but not out of my Saturday TBS lineup. And while it was obviously not the first of its kind, Braveheart remains the most of its kind.
#BRAVE HEART MEL GIBSON MOVIE#
Those blockbusters were ointments for the British-ish fantasy itch Braveheart and its ilk-Hollywood-monied, old-school, epic treatments of English imperial history pre-1800 directed by cocky movie stars-stirred up in the culture a few short decades ago. Because, though Gladiator asked it aloud first, Braveheart wears it better: Are you not entertained?Ģ020 is a very post– Gladiator, post– Game of Thrones age. Which, I must confess, would almost-almost-be a shame. Gibson’s buoyant mane, the birdlike gaze and ethereal wandering of Princess Isabella ( Sophie Marceau), the primal satisfaction of bad guys getting clubbed in the head precisely when the drama calls for it, the titular-but-not hero screaming “Freedom!” as he’s drawn and quartered…stick to history and much of this will get unceremoniously tossed, like Wallace’s gonads by the end of the movie. Strip Braveheart of everything that’s bad or “wrong” about it, and you’ve stripped the movie of what makes it work. As I rewatched the film, what I expected to play as pure camp only sort of played that way. Though I’m also not convinced it has aged totally poorly. Which isn’t to say Braveheart has escaped time altogether it hails, of course, from a more innocent era in which our feelings about Mel Gibson could be uncomplicated. It escaped Neil deGrasse Tyson–esque clapbacks questioning whether a heart, per se, really can be brave. The movie predates the nit-sensitive era of internet fact-checking. Its appearance on a list of the most inaccurate movies ever, published more than 10 years ago, feels from our current vantage like a badge of honor. Braveheart is the kind of film that enjoys the irony of dropping lines like “history is written by those who hang the hero”-then doing fuck-all with history (and castrating the hero). Never mind that, though there’s no use playing Jenga with the factual inconsistencies of this baffling, silly, defiantly satisfying movie. “Braveheart,” the actual historical moniker, referred not to William Wallace (the rebellious Scottish knight whose life story Gibson ostensibly recounts in the movie), but to Robert the Bruce, played by Angus Macfadyen. Though the title is apt, it’s also incorrect. No word could be more suitable for a poster featuring Gibson’s war-grimed, purposeful face, in which the Brave and the Heart are perfectly apparent. Mel Gibson’s Oscar-winning vanity epic turned 25 years old this month, which beckons the requisite quarter-life crisis and reconsideration-starting with that title, a perfect relic of its time.
You have to admire a title that’s as quick to the chase as it is thematically apt.
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