The Patriot (2000 film)

The Patriot is a 2000 American epic historical war film directed by Roland Emmerich and written by Robert Rodat. The film stars Mel Gibson, Heath Ledger, Joely Richardson, Jason Isaacs, Chris Cooper, and Tom Wilkinson. Set in Berkeley County, South Carolina, it follows Benjamin Martin (Gibson), an American colonist who is opposed to going to war with Great Britain but, along with his son Gabriel (Ledger), gets swept into the American Revolutionary War when his home life is disrupted, and one of his sons is murdered by a cruel British officer (Isaacs).

The film had its world premiere in Century City on June 27, 2000, and was theatrically released in the United States on June 30, 2000 by Sony Pictures Releasing. It received mixed-to-positive reviews from critics and grossed $215.3 million against a $110 million budget, and was nominated for three Academy Awards including Best Cinematography and Best Original Score.

The Patriot generated significant controversy due its historical inaccuracies, in particular its fictionalized portrayal of British figures and atrocities. The portrayal of the protagonist, a composite character based on several persons including Francis Marion; and that "it boiled the American Revolution down to one guy wanting revenge." Gibson was paid a record salary of $25 million. Jude Law was offered the role of William Tavington, but turned it down, the role eventually went to Jason Isaacs after submitting an audition tape. Joshua Jackson, Elijah Wood, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Brad Renfro were considered to play Gabriel Martin. The producers and director narrowed their choices for the role of Gabriel to Ryan Phillippe and Heath Ledger, with Ledger chosen because Roland Emmerich thought he possessed "exuberant youth."

Filming

The film's German director Emmerich said "these were characters I could relate to, and they were engaged in a conflict that had a significant outcome—the creation of the first modern democratic government." Other scenes were filmed at Mansfield Plantation, an antebellum rice plantation in Georgetown, Middleton Place in Charleston, South Carolina, at the Cistern Yard on the campus of College of Charleston, and Hightower Hall and Homestead House at Brattonsville, South Carolina, along with the grounds of the Brattonsville Plantation in McConnells, South Carolina. Producer Mark Gordon said the production team "tried their best to be as authentic as possible" because "the backdrop was serious history," giving attention to details in period dress. Producer Dean Devlin and the film's costume designers examined actual Revolutionary War uniforms at the Smithsonian Institution prior to shooting. David Arnold, who composed the scores to Emmerich's Stargate, Independence Day, and Godzilla, created a demo for The Patriot that was ultimately rejected. As a result, Arnold never returned to compose for any of Emmerich's subsequent films and was replaced by Harald Kloser and Thomas Wander.

Reception

Critical response

On Rotten Tomatoes, The Patriot holds an approval rating of 62% based on 138 reviews. The site's critics consensus reads: "The Patriot can be entertaining to watch, but it relies too much on formula and melodrama." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 63 out of 100, based on 35 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade "A" on an A+ to F scale.

The New York Times critic Elvis Mitchell gave the film a generally negative review, although he praised its casting and called Mel Gibson "an astonishing actor", particularly for his "on-screen comfort and expansiveness". He said the film is a "gruesome hybrid, a mix of sentimentality and brutality". Jamie Malanowski, also writing in The New York Times, said The Patriot "will prove to many a satisfying way to spend a summer evening. It's got big battles and wrenching hand-to-hand combat, a courageous but conflicted hero and a dastardly and totally guilt-free villain, thrills, tenderness, sorrow, rage and a little bit of kissing". In his review of the film, the critic Roger Ebert wrote, "I enjoyed the strength and conviction of Gibson's performance, the sweep of the battle scenes, and the absurdity of the British caricatures. None of it has much to do with the historical reality of the Revolutionary War, but with such an enormous budget at risk, how could it?"

False reviews controversy

A highly positive review was purportedly written by a critic named David Manning, who was credited to The Ridgefield Press, a small Connecticut weekly news publication. During an investigation into Manning's quotes, Newsweek reporter John Horn discovered that the newspaper had never heard of him. The story emerged at around the same time as an announcement that Sony had used employees posing as moviegoers in television commercials to praise the film. All of those occurrences raised questions and controversies about ethics in film promotion practices.

On the June 10, 2001 episode of Le Show, host Harry Shearer conducted an in-studio interview with Manning, whose "review" of the film was positive. The voice of Manning was provided by a computer voice synthesizer.

On August 3, 2005, Sony made an out-of-court settlement and agreed to refund $5 each to dissatisfied customers who saw that and four other films in American theaters as a result of Manning's reviews.

Box office

The Patriot opened in 3,061 venues at #2 with $22,413,710 domestically in its opening weekend, falling slightly short of expectations (predictions had the film opening #1 with roughly $25 million ahead). The film opened behind Warner Bros.'s The Perfect Storm, which opened at #1 with $41,325,042. The film closed on October 16, 2000, with a domestic total of $113,330,342. It saw a similar level of success in foreign markets, earning $101,964,000 there for a grand total of $215,294,342, against a production budget of $110 million.

Accolades

The Patriot was nominated for three Academy Awards: Best Cinematography, Best Original Score, and Best Sound (Kevin O'Connell, Greg P. Russell and Lee Orloff). It also received several guild awards, including the American Society of Cinematographers award to Caleb Deschanel for Outstanding Achievement in Cinematography and the Hollywood Makeup Artist and Hair Stylist Guild Award for Best Period Makeup and Best Period Hair Styling.

Strictures

In the introduction to his book about the American Revolutionary War, Hugh Bicheno wrote of the irritation to himself and historian Richard Holmes, who presented the companion televised series, "... not so much with the banal stereotyping of the film The Patriot (2000) as by the tiresome argument that it was 'just entertainment'."

Bicheno compares it with its artistic template, Sergei Eisenstein's film Alexander Nevsky, "... both being works of contemporary propaganda thinly disguised as historical drama. But the similarities end there, for the very existence of Eisenstein's Russia was under imminent threat by the Teutonic enemy Nevsky defeated, hardly the case of the United States vis-à-vis today's Britain."

In an assessment of war movies, military historian Antony Beevor quotes journalist Andrew Marr:

Historical authenticity

During development, Emmerich and his team consulted experts at the Smithsonian Institution on set, props, and costumes; advisor Rex Ellis even recommended the Gullah village as an appropriate place for Martin's family to hide. In addition, screenwriter Robert Rodat read through many journals and letters of colonists as part of his preparation for writing the screenplay.

Producer Mark Gordon said that in making the film, "while we were telling a fictional story, the backdrop was serious history". and others were adapted, such as the final battle in the film which combined elements of the Battles of Cowpens and Battle of Guilford Court House, most of the plot events in the film are pure fiction. Gibson himself referred to it as "sheer fantasy" at the time of release. In 2011, Time ranked The Patriot in a list of the "Top 10 Historically Misleading Films." Historian Christopher Hibbert told the Daily Express about Marion:

<blockquote>The truth is that people like Marion committed atrocities as bad, if not worse, than those perpetrated by the British.</blockquote>

The Patriot does not depict the American character Benjamin Martin as innocent of atrocities; a key plot point revolves around the character's guilt over acts he engaged in, such as torturing, killing, and mutilating prisoners during the French and Indian War, leading him to repentantly repudiate General Cornwallis for the brutality of his men.

Conservative radio host Michael Graham rejected Hibbert's criticism of Marion in a commentary published in National Review:

<blockquote>Was Francis Marion a slave owner? Was he a determined and dangerous warrior? Did he commit acts in an 18th century war that we would consider atrocious in the current world of peace and political correctness? As another great American film hero might say: 'You're damn right.' "That's what made him a hero, 200 years ago and today."</blockquote>

Graham also refers to what he describes as "the unchallenged work of South Carolina's premier historian" Dr. Walter Edgar, who claimed in his 1998 South Carolina: A History that Marion's partisans were "a ragged band of both black and white volunteers". The introduction to the 2007 edition of Simms' book was written by Sean Busick, a professor of American history at Athens State University in Alabama, who wrote:

<blockquote>Marion deserves to be remembered as one of the heroes of the War for Independence....Francis Marion was a man of his times: he owned slaves, and he fought in a brutal campaign against the Cherokee Indians...Marion's experience in the French and Indian War prepared him for more admirable service. Lee wrote that after he and his wife went to see the film, "we both came out of the theatre fuming. For three hours The Patriot dodged around, skirted about or completely ignored slavery." Gibson himself remarked in 2006: "I think I would have made him a slave holder. Not to seems kind of a cop-out."

Criticism of Tavington as based on Tarleton

After release, several British voices criticized the film for its depiction of the film's villain Tavington and defended the historical character of Banastre Tarleton. Ben Fenton, commenting in The Daily Telegraph, wrote:

<blockquote>There is no evidence that Tarleton, called 'Bloody Ban' or 'The Butcher' in rebel pamphlets, ever broke the rules of war and certainly did not ever shoot a child in cold blood.</blockquote>Although Tarleton gained the reputation among Americans as a butcher for his involvement in the Battle of Waxhaws in South Carolina,

Whereas Tavington is depicted as aristocratic but penniless, Tarleton came from a wealthy Liverpool merchant family. Tarleton did not die in battle or from impalement, as Tavington did in the film. Tarleton died on January 16, 1833, in Leintwardine, Herefordshire, England, at the age of 78, nearly 50 years after the war ended. He outlived Col. Francis Marion, who died in 1795, by 38 years. Before his death, Tarleton had achieved the military rank of General, equal to that held by the overall British commanders during the American Revolution, and became a baronet and a member of the British Parliament.

Depiction of atrocities in the Revolutionary War

The Patriot was criticized for misrepresenting atrocities during the Revolutionary War, including the killing of prisoners of war and wounded soldiers and Tavington's burning a church filled with civilians. Although historians have noted that both sides during the conflict committed atrocities, they "generally agree that the rebels probably violated the rules of war more often than the British". According to Salon.com, the church-burning scene in the film is based on the Oradour-sur-Glane massacre committed by German forces in 1944, though "[there] is no evidence that a similar event took place during the American Revolution". Historian Bill Segars noted that there was no record of the British ever burning a church full of civilians during the Revolutionary War, though British and Loyalist forces did burn several empty churches such as the St. Philip's Church in Brunswick Town and Indiantown Presbyterian Church.

The New York Post film critic Jonathan Foreman was one of several focusing on this distortion in the film and wrote the following in an article at Salon.com:

<blockquote>The most disturbing thing about The Patriot is not just that German director Roland Emmerich (director of Independence Day) and his screenwriter Robert Rodat (who was criticized for excluding the roles played by British and other Allied troops in the Normandy landings from his script for Saving Private Ryan) depicted British troops as committing savage atrocities, but that those atrocities bear such a close resemblance to war crimes carried out by German troops—particularly the SS in World War II. It's hard not to wonder if the filmmakers have some kind of subconscious agenda... They have made a film that will have the effect of inoculating audiences against the unique historical horror of Oradour—and implicitly rehabilitating the Nazis while making the British seem as evil as history's worst monsters... So it's no wonder that the British press sees this film as a kind of blood libel against the British people.</blockquote>

The Washington Post film critic Stephen Hunter said: "Any image of the American Revolution which represents you Brits as Nazis and us as gentle folk is almost certainly wrong. It was a very bitter war, a total war, and that is something that I am afraid has been lost to history....[T]he presence of the Loyalists (colonists who did not want to join the fight for independence from Britain) meant that the War of Independence was a conflict of complex loyalties." The historian Richard F. Snow, editor of American Heritage magazine, said of the church-burning scene: "Of course it never happened—if it had do you think Americans would have forgotten it? It could have kept us out of World War I."

Role of African Americans in the Revolutionary War

The character Occam (played by Jay Arlen Jones) is an enslaved African American man who fights in the war in place of his master, and is freed after a year's service via a general order of the Continental Army, while continuing to serve with the militia until the end of the war. Historically, no such order existed. While Black Patriots constituted a sizable portion of the Patriot forces, enslaved servicemen were not entitled to emancipation, and many were returned or re-sold to their masters at the war's end, At least one Black Patriot soldier, James Roberts, expressed regret for his Revolutionary War service.

Conversely, the Dunmore's Proclamation in November 1775 offered emancipation to all slaves and indentured servants who volunteered to join British forces, coming to be known as Black Loyalists. The 1779 Philipsburg Proclamation de facto freed all slaves owned by American Patriots throughout the rebel states, and resulted in a in a significant number of runaways. According to historian Cassandra Pybus, approximately 20,000 attempted to leave their owners and join the British over the course of the entire war. At the end of the war, the British relocated several thousand free Black Loyalists to Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone, while the Treaty of Paris (1783) regarded all runaways as American property entitled to re-enslavement.

Omission of Loyalists from the British forces

The Journal of American History criticized the film for its omission of Loyalists in the British forces, when they represented a significant portion of that side's manpower. The film was later released on 4K UHD Blu-ray on May 22, 2018.

References

External links

Government info on Southern Campaign, Banastre Tarleton, and Benjamin Martin