The Patriot (Columbia Pictures, Centropolis Entertainment, Mutual Film Company, Global Entertainment Productions GmbH & Company Medien KG, H2L Media Group, 2000)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, July 6) my husband Charles and I watched the 2000 movie The Patriot, a tale of the American Revolution produced by Dean Devlin, directed by Roland Emmerich, written by Robert Rodat, and starring Mel Gibson as South Carolina farmer Benjamin Martin. Benjamin is a farmer and a single father of seven children (Rodat’s original script said they were only six, but when Gibson was cast he insisted Rodat give him an extra child to match the seven kids Gibson had in real life; he’s since had two more). The film begins in 1776, after the Revolution has already started but while the Continental Congress is still debating whether or not to declare formal independence from Great Britain. In 1775 the Congress had sent to London the so-called “Olive Branch” petition, which proposed an arrangement similar to what later became the British Commonwealth of Nations: America would become functionally independent but still recognize the British Crown as sovereign. Alas, King George III or (more likely) his supporters in Parliament rejected the petition without any serious consideration, setting up the Revolutionary War. When the film begins Benjamin has been summoned to a meeting in Charles Town, South Carolina, the colony’s capital (it was not given its current name, Charleston, until 1783), to debate whether or not to support the declaration of independence, as eight of the 13 colonies have already done. Benjamin is as upset as anybody about the heavy taxes the British Crown is levying against them, but he’s against declaring independence. As he puts it – in a line screenwriter Rodat cribbed from a real-life Loyalist, Rev. Mather Byles of Boston – “Why should I trade one tyrant three thousand miles away for three thousand tyrants one mile away?”

Benjamin’s sympathies do an abrupt about-face when one of his children, Thomas (Gregory Smith), is killed by British soldiers rampaging through the area. He watches a battle in which the official forces of the Continental Army are massacred en masse by the British Redcoats after both sides confront each other by standing up and marching towards each other. Benjamin pronounces the Continental commander stupid and decides to join the war, not as part of the regular Continental Army but as leader of a band of guerrilla fighters (today they’d be called “unlawful combatants”), whom he recruits partly from churches and partly from bars. He asks the field officers of the Continental Army to assign him his eldest son, Gabriel (Heath Ledger, in the role that made him a star and launched his meteoric eight-year career before his tragic death from a prescription drug overdose in 2008), as his second-in-command. Benjamin’s irregulars fight a number of battles in which they seem to come out of nowhere and pick off the British soldiers at random, and they’re so effective at this that the British officers nickname Benjamin “The Ghost.” Unfortunately, in one battle in which they’re fighting side by side, Gabriel is mortally wounded just after his wife Anne Howard (Lisa Brenner) is incinerated in a church set on fire by the film’s principal villain, sadistic British Col. William Tavington (Jason Isaacs, cast after the original choice, Kevin Spacey, turned down the role because Mel Gibson was already being paid $25 million and that didn’t leave enough in the budget for him) after he locked and chained all the doors so the colonists couldn’t get away. The film proceeds to the final battle, modeled after the real life Battle of Cowpens in South Carolina on January 17, 1781. Benjamin finally fulfills his promise to kill Col. Tavington by his own hand, and the revolutionaries score a major victory that sets up the final end of the war at Yorktown, Virginia nine months later.

Other characters in the mix include Rev. Oliver (René Auberjonois, for once not playing a screaming queen), the minister who married Gabriel and Anne and pastored the church Tavington burned down; and the rather supercilious French officer Jean Villenueve (Tchéky Karyo, who was born in Turkey but raised in Paris), who bears the brunt of the criticism of Benjamin and his men that the French aren’t doing enough to help their nominal U.S. allies. Their relations are complicated by the fact that Benjamin had previously fought in the French and Indian War of 1754-1763 and had led a campaign in the Wilderness. That had given him a reputation as a war hero, even though what he’d actually done (as he confesses midway through the movie) was commit a series of war crimes including massacring a group of French-Canadian civilians en masse. I had ordered a three-hour “extended version” of The Patriot on Blu-Ray (the standard theatrical version was 2 hours 45 minutes) and I generally liked the film a lot better than Charles did. Charles thought that Mel Gibson, who was born January 3, 1956 in Peekskill, New York and therefore was 44 when he made this movie, was too long in the tooth to play an action hero. Ironically, the role was originally offered to Harrison Ford, who was even older (born July 13, 1942), but he turned it down because he felt Rodat’s script had reduced the American Revolution to a one-man revenge struggle. And that’s a particularly strange complaint given how long John Wayne played action heroes almost until he croaked!

One of the things I liked most about The Patriot is the way it depicts the American Revolution as a turning point in world history, but not necessarily in the ways you’d expect, or the ways American history proclaims it. Col. Tavington – who as a character reminded me quite a lot of President Trump’s nastiest policy advisor, Stephen Miller, architect of Trump’s deliberately cruel jihad against immigrants – is constantly at odds with his immediate superior, Gen. Charles Cornwallis (Tom Wilkinson), because Cornwallis insists that there are gentlemanly rules that should govern even as inherently inhumane an enterprise as war, while Tavington has the more modern attitude that a military should do anything to win, including targeting innocent civilians and destroying their houses and farms. There’s a great scene of Cornwallis hosting an outdoor party that reminded me of James Agee’s description of a similar scene involving the French on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt in Laurence Olivier’s film of Shakespeare’s Henry V (1944): “Olivier transforms the French into sleepy, overconfident, highly intelligent, highly sophisticated noblemen, subtly disunified, casually contemptuous of their Dauphin – an all but definitive embodiment of a civilization a little too ripe to survive.” The final confrontation between Cornwallis and Tavington takes place when Cornwallis orders Tavington to find and kill “The Ghost,” and Tavington replies that this will mean using tactics that will not be “gentlemanly” – which prefaces his burning of the church and everyone inside it once he extracts the information of where Benjamin is hiding.

One of the things I didn’t like so much about The Patriot is that Rodat, like a screenwriter in Hollywood’s classic era, fills his script with so many “plants,” so many coincidence (like the framing of Benjamin’s character arc with the loss of Thomas in the beginning and Gabriel in the end), and a horrendous “comic relief” sub-subplot I could have lived without. Anne is at first reluctant to date Gabriel because of a prank he pulled on her when she was just 11 – he spiked her tea with ink, which she said blackened her teeth for a month (which seems hard to believe given what they used for ink in the period), and after they’re married she gets back at him by spiking his tea with ink, then gets her own teeth blackened from him kissing her. One of the best things about The Patriot is it shows just how home-grown a war the American Revolution was. Not only was it a low-tech war (one of Rodat’s weird bits of symbolism was to have Benjamin take his late son Thomas’s toy soldiers and melt down each one in turn to form pellets to shoot in his musket, recalling an article I read once about how modern-day defenders of the Second Amendment ignore the fact that when the Second Amendment was written, guns were things that basically shot marbles), it was an oddly down-to-earth one. When we first see the rival British and American armies standing straight as they charge each other, our first thought was, “Why aren’t they going to ground?” Then I realized it was because they didn’t think they had to: the guns of the day were so low-tech they had to be laboriously reloaded after each shot (Emmerich fortunately avoided the error I’ve seen in other films about 16th and 17th century wars in which the filmmakers had people fire multiple shots from their guns in quick succession, something the firearms of the period couldn’t do), and so the armies had to hold their fire and shoot at each other in synchronized barrages as ordered by their commanders. It was only in the 19th century, as gun technology improved and it became possible to fire sustained barrages from a single gun, that armies started going to ground and ultimately digging trenches (an innovation of Ulysses S. Grant in the American Civil War that got copied and helped lead to the insane carnage of World War I).

I also liked the way slavery was treated in Rodat’s script. He had Benjamin make clear that the Blacks who work on his farm are free laborers, not slaves, and when Benjamin takes in the slave Occam (Jay Arlen Jones) after his master has abandoned him and fled, he enlists him in his militia. Occam agrees to join, despite the opposition of a racist in the militia who can’t believe that Benjamin is willing to give a Black man a gun, largely on the basis of a promise made by George Washington that any slave who joined the Continental Army and fought for a year would be given his freedom and a bonus payment. (Actually, as an imdb.com “Goofs” poster pointed out, that promise only applied to people who joined the regular Continental Army, not an informal guerrilla group like Benjamin’s.) Occam’s discontent with the final outcome of the war, and particularly his well-founded fear that the promised “freedom” won’t be delivered to people who look like him, subtly and cunningly evokes the still unfinished (and, under the current regime, actively reversed) task of making people of color truly equal Americans. Overall, The Patriot is quite a good movie and a well-done homage to the American Revolution, which has been the subject of all too few movies – especially by contrast to the number that have been made about the Civil War, including two of the all-time blockbuster hits, The Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind.