Critics reacted badly to this Mel Gibson movie from 2000. Roger Ebert said:
I knew that because the main character, Benjamin Martin, is too morally good by modern standards. He is a wealthy Southern plantation owner who has Black freedmen working on his land, not slaves, and everyone adores and esteems him, though he got his esteem in part due to his participation in war crimes in the past.
This seems highly, highly unlikely for a number of reasons, starting with the fact that the South didn't want to give up slavery (leading to the later American Civil War) in part because it allowed for the only soak the rich tax scheme in the history of humanity that I am personally aware actually worked.
If you owned slaves, you paid taxes on each slave. If you didn't, you didn't pay a lot of taxes.
I imagine other people would have strongly objected to a clearly wealthy plantation owner with freedmen working it, thus avoiding paying his fair share of the local tax burden.
Usually, what happens is you decide "Them damn rich folks buy too many yachts and enjoy life too damn much." so you create a yacht tax and rich people mostly stop buying yachts and go find some other hobby until that tax issue goes away. Most of the local yacht builders go out of business and the people who suffer for your soak the rich tax scheme is mostly someone other than the rich folks you hate and want to bleed for money.
Anyway, it's hard to make good movies and other stories for a really long list of reasons. If you use a historical setting, someone will rake you over the coals for any way in which your story fails to be historically accurate and if you strive for historical accuracy, odds are high some social justice warrior type will object to the language, the ugly treatment of specific demographic groups, etc.
Hattie McDaniel won the 1939 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in Gone with the Wind. She was the first Black actor to have been nominated and win an Oscar. She supposedly once said:
Nichelle Nicoles once complained to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. about her role on Star Trek. She was considering quitting because she was basically a glorified secretary, but in space.
He told her his children were only allowed to watch Star Trek because she was on it. So she didn't quit.
So there is an inherent friction between telling a good story that tells the truth and telling a good story that describes the world more like we wish it would be. I "forgive this movie" its "sins" of wild inaccuracy because it tells a story about an idealized man, one who manages to be a good person in ways the modern world thinks matter in spite of the world around him.
I enjoy this film in part because of the dignity with which it treats the Black characters, the women and the children, but, no, that's not historically accurate. At least not most of it.
Some of the parts I like may be closer to reality than a lot of people would be comfortable with. When Benjamin Martin takes his two youngest sons and massacres the Red Coats holding his oldest son Gabriel, two fairly young boys comfortable with shooting a gun and willing to participate in killing people may be more accurate than a lot of modern peoples would really approve of given the amount of anti-gun and anti-hunting sentiment you see on the internet at times.
YouTube clips of it seem to consistently label it a revenge scene, which misses the point entirely. It's not about revenge for the unjust death of Thomas, though clearly Benjamin Martin's anger over that helps fuel his butchery of this troop of Red Coats.
No, the real point is to save the life of his oldest son Gabriel from an unjust and illegal hanging ordered by the corrupt and sadistic antagonist in the film, Colonel William Tavington.
I like the scene for the sheer competence of Benjamin Martin who is willing to take on an entire troop of Red Coats aided only by his two youngest sons in part because he knows he's good at what he does. He's not overconfident but he also is not unduly scared given that it clearly is within his capacity to pull it off.
I like the scene because it captures the moral complexity of the main character. Good morality plays always involve moral complexity, like "So, just WHEN is it morally okay to butcher a bunch of people?" If the story is too morally simple, it won't be thought-provoking, it won't teach you anything and it won't give you any opportunity to learn and grow on topics it's best to think through in theory and ideally not have to make such hard choices in practice.
I like how shocked his three sons are to see his brutality as he hacks away at the last man he kills, ending up drenched in blood which he wasn't before killing that last man. We learn later that this kind of brutality is not anything he is a stranger to, but it's news to his children who have not heard the details of the war crimes in which he participated in the past.
I also like the fact that the shock shows on their faces but they say nothing to criticize him. They are shocked but not morally outraged. They all implicitly agree that killing the entire troop of Red Coats was the right thing to do, even though it involved using two children to pull it off successfully and showed them a side of their father they hadn't previously known.
And, yet, they DID know he was a soldier who fought in the front lines of a previous conflict prior to being a farmer. This perhaps helps temper their strong reaction and allows them to feel like "War is ugly" rather than "My father is a monster."
The children working the field would also be historically accurate, and never mind how many Americans today consider it to be abusive to have children work. The American public school system schedule with Spring Break and Summer Break is rooted in the fact that children attended school at one time only when their labor wasn't needed to do the spring planting and to tend to the fields and bring in the harvest all summer long.
This wasn't about treating kids abusively. It was about making sure there was enough to eat for everyone and also making sure the children learned how to raise food themselves. This was a survival issue for humans and many people seem to have forgotten the fact that until extremely recently, most of human society was trying like hell to just get enough to eat to keep everyone alive and everything else took a back seat to that need.
I like the fact that the women in this film are not merely ladies in waiting, a thing mocked wonderfully in one of the Shrek films.
This is related to another detail of the movie that I like, Benjamin Martin's speech about how this war will not be fought on some frontier. It will happen among our homes and our children will learn of it with their own eyes.
One of the things wrong with the USA is that we tend to assume wars happen elsewhere, because this is mostly true for modern Americans. And we tend to assume it doesn't directly impact the lives of women and children, it doesn't directly impact cities and towns and residential areas.
We tend to think war happens on some field of battle, like football or baseball. And perhaps we would handle international matters more sensitively if we understood war as being something that happens in "civilized" places and makes them very uncivilized. Perhaps if we understood the social and psychological cost better, we would do some things differently and then non-Americans wouldn't make jokes like "Be careful what you say about the US or they might bring freedom to YOUR country."
Not really where I thought this post would go or I wouldn't have it on this blog. I put it here because I grew up in the Deep South and my father was old enough to be my grandfather, so I grew up with a garden out back and food he hunted on the dinner table for some portion of our meals.
My childhood was like some cross between life in the 1700s and life in a modern suburb and it makes me think SOME of the social details of the movie are quite accurate, details most people wouldn't care about or be interested in.
I like it in short because it portrays the women's role during war as keeping the home fires burning and doesn't trivialize that responsibility. It shows how hard that is to do at all, much less well, in the face of brutal conditions where your life and the lives of everyone you care about are at risk and your home, your food supplies etc -- everything that makes for civilized life -- is also at risk of being taken away on a moment's notice.
As a former military wife, I like that aspect of the film very much. It stands in stark contrast to so much messaging in the world today that a woman needs "a real career" -- a male-coded "real" career -- to matter in life and that "mere homemakers" aren't really people at all.
None of it has much to do with the historical reality of the Revolutionary War.Wikipedia gives details on some of the historically inaccurate details that stirred controversy. Those specific details are news to me but I knew without looking anything up that the film had to be a fictional story set against the backdrop of the American Revolution and that it was making no effort to be historically accurate about a lot of things.
I knew that because the main character, Benjamin Martin, is too morally good by modern standards. He is a wealthy Southern plantation owner who has Black freedmen working on his land, not slaves, and everyone adores and esteems him, though he got his esteem in part due to his participation in war crimes in the past.
This seems highly, highly unlikely for a number of reasons, starting with the fact that the South didn't want to give up slavery (leading to the later American Civil War) in part because it allowed for the only soak the rich tax scheme in the history of humanity that I am personally aware actually worked.
If you owned slaves, you paid taxes on each slave. If you didn't, you didn't pay a lot of taxes.
I imagine other people would have strongly objected to a clearly wealthy plantation owner with freedmen working it, thus avoiding paying his fair share of the local tax burden.
Usually, what happens is you decide "Them damn rich folks buy too many yachts and enjoy life too damn much." so you create a yacht tax and rich people mostly stop buying yachts and go find some other hobby until that tax issue goes away. Most of the local yacht builders go out of business and the people who suffer for your soak the rich tax scheme is mostly someone other than the rich folks you hate and want to bleed for money.
Anyway, it's hard to make good movies and other stories for a really long list of reasons. If you use a historical setting, someone will rake you over the coals for any way in which your story fails to be historically accurate and if you strive for historical accuracy, odds are high some social justice warrior type will object to the language, the ugly treatment of specific demographic groups, etc.
Hattie McDaniel won the 1939 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in Gone with the Wind. She was the first Black actor to have been nominated and win an Oscar. She supposedly once said:
Why should I complain about making $700 a week playing a maid? If I didn't, I'd be making $7 a week being one.She wasn't merely speculating. She worked as an actual maid prior to making it as an actress and this was a time when "another day, another dollar" was literally true. We have that saying because at one time, a dollar a day was a fairly common wage for a working adult.
Nichelle Nicoles once complained to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. about her role on Star Trek. She was considering quitting because she was basically a glorified secretary, but in space.
He told her his children were only allowed to watch Star Trek because she was on it. So she didn't quit.
So there is an inherent friction between telling a good story that tells the truth and telling a good story that describes the world more like we wish it would be. I "forgive this movie" its "sins" of wild inaccuracy because it tells a story about an idealized man, one who manages to be a good person in ways the modern world thinks matter in spite of the world around him.
I enjoy this film in part because of the dignity with which it treats the Black characters, the women and the children, but, no, that's not historically accurate. At least not most of it.
Some of the parts I like may be closer to reality than a lot of people would be comfortable with. When Benjamin Martin takes his two youngest sons and massacres the Red Coats holding his oldest son Gabriel, two fairly young boys comfortable with shooting a gun and willing to participate in killing people may be more accurate than a lot of modern peoples would really approve of given the amount of anti-gun and anti-hunting sentiment you see on the internet at times.
The massacre in question.
YouTube clips of it seem to consistently label it a revenge scene, which misses the point entirely. It's not about revenge for the unjust death of Thomas, though clearly Benjamin Martin's anger over that helps fuel his butchery of this troop of Red Coats.
No, the real point is to save the life of his oldest son Gabriel from an unjust and illegal hanging ordered by the corrupt and sadistic antagonist in the film, Colonel William Tavington.
I like the scene for the sheer competence of Benjamin Martin who is willing to take on an entire troop of Red Coats aided only by his two youngest sons in part because he knows he's good at what he does. He's not overconfident but he also is not unduly scared given that it clearly is within his capacity to pull it off.
I like the scene because it captures the moral complexity of the main character. Good morality plays always involve moral complexity, like "So, just WHEN is it morally okay to butcher a bunch of people?" If the story is too morally simple, it won't be thought-provoking, it won't teach you anything and it won't give you any opportunity to learn and grow on topics it's best to think through in theory and ideally not have to make such hard choices in practice.
I like how shocked his three sons are to see his brutality as he hacks away at the last man he kills, ending up drenched in blood which he wasn't before killing that last man. We learn later that this kind of brutality is not anything he is a stranger to, but it's news to his children who have not heard the details of the war crimes in which he participated in the past.
I also like the fact that the shock shows on their faces but they say nothing to criticize him. They are shocked but not morally outraged. They all implicitly agree that killing the entire troop of Red Coats was the right thing to do, even though it involved using two children to pull it off successfully and showed them a side of their father they hadn't previously known.
And, yet, they DID know he was a soldier who fought in the front lines of a previous conflict prior to being a farmer. This perhaps helps temper their strong reaction and allows them to feel like "War is ugly" rather than "My father is a monster."
The children working the field would also be historically accurate, and never mind how many Americans today consider it to be abusive to have children work. The American public school system schedule with Spring Break and Summer Break is rooted in the fact that children attended school at one time only when their labor wasn't needed to do the spring planting and to tend to the fields and bring in the harvest all summer long.
This wasn't about treating kids abusively. It was about making sure there was enough to eat for everyone and also making sure the children learned how to raise food themselves. This was a survival issue for humans and many people seem to have forgotten the fact that until extremely recently, most of human society was trying like hell to just get enough to eat to keep everyone alive and everything else took a back seat to that need.
I like the fact that the women in this film are not merely ladies in waiting, a thing mocked wonderfully in one of the Shrek films.
Ladies, assume the position. -- What are you doing? -- Waiting to be rescued.
This is related to another detail of the movie that I like, Benjamin Martin's speech about how this war will not be fought on some frontier. It will happen among our homes and our children will learn of it with their own eyes.
One of the things wrong with the USA is that we tend to assume wars happen elsewhere, because this is mostly true for modern Americans. And we tend to assume it doesn't directly impact the lives of women and children, it doesn't directly impact cities and towns and residential areas.
We tend to think war happens on some field of battle, like football or baseball. And perhaps we would handle international matters more sensitively if we understood war as being something that happens in "civilized" places and makes them very uncivilized. Perhaps if we understood the social and psychological cost better, we would do some things differently and then non-Americans wouldn't make jokes like "Be careful what you say about the US or they might bring freedom to YOUR country."
Not really where I thought this post would go or I wouldn't have it on this blog. I put it here because I grew up in the Deep South and my father was old enough to be my grandfather, so I grew up with a garden out back and food he hunted on the dinner table for some portion of our meals.
My childhood was like some cross between life in the 1700s and life in a modern suburb and it makes me think SOME of the social details of the movie are quite accurate, details most people wouldn't care about or be interested in.
I like it in short because it portrays the women's role during war as keeping the home fires burning and doesn't trivialize that responsibility. It shows how hard that is to do at all, much less well, in the face of brutal conditions where your life and the lives of everyone you care about are at risk and your home, your food supplies etc -- everything that makes for civilized life -- is also at risk of being taken away on a moment's notice.
As a former military wife, I like that aspect of the film very much. It stands in stark contrast to so much messaging in the world today that a woman needs "a real career" -- a male-coded "real" career -- to matter in life and that "mere homemakers" aren't really people at all.