Common Sense Note
Parents need to be aware of the high level of blood and gore (animal and human), vulgarity, and sexual elements presented here. This is NOT a movie for kids, and the R rating should be noted.
Families can talk about the theme of true heroes -- warriors, dissidents (and filmmakers?) who don't back down or compromise their ethics -- often fail to get their just recognition and glory during their lifetimes, only painful death. That's a theme to ponder, but parents might emphasize to impressionable viewers that, while William Wallace apparently did exist, much of this movie's script has been shown to be historically bogus.
Common Sense Review
Reviewed By: Charles Cassady, Jr.
Directed, produced by, and starring Mel Gibson -- who, much as he did years later with THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST, invested millions of his own fortune in it -- BRAVEHEART is a rousing, formidably-lengthy but very adult historical battle epic (though factual inaccuracies abound) in which two moral lessons clearly stand out. First, the PASSIONate notion that in this troubled world, firm and inflexible principles can lead to pain, agonized suffering, and martyrdom, even though one's cause be righteous. Second -- kill the British!
The setting is 14th-century Scotland, oppressed by the English King Edward I (Patrick McGoohan), alias `Longshanks,' who in the opening moments hangs and murders two expeditions of Highlanders trying to negotiate a peace treaty. The son of one victim is the boy William Wallace, who grows up to be Mel Gibson, a well-traveled and educated commoner. His announced plans for a nice, quiet life raising a family are once again thwarted by the far-off Longshanks, who in a medieval form of ethnic cleansing, has just granted British nobles the legal right to sexually abuse Scottish women. William's wife ends up killed by the brutish British soldiers.
Fighting back, Wallace is joined, Robin-Hood-style, by other angry Scots and an English-hating Irish brigand. They use guerilla tactics (and maces, and long, nasty spears) successfully against the British soldiers, horsemen, and archers sent to end their uprising. They even manage to capture a vital British city.
Such is the negative portrayal of the English as invaders, bullies, twits, and perverts, that this would have been a box-office smash if it played the colonies around 1776. But, ironically, Wallace's goal of independence for Scotland is thwarted by the region's own aristocrat class (partially symbolized by a leprosy-afflicted nobleman, so corrupt he's more rotted every time he appears). Wallace desperately needs their support, but the gentry have their own holdings of property and money in England, and Longshanks' tyranny doesn't touch them personally. Betrayed on the battlefield by his high-born countrymen, Wallace personally assassinates a number of them out of vengeance before being captured and handed over to the English for public torture and execution. Wallace is unyielding to the end, and his example shames the Scottish prince Robert the Bruce (Angus McFayden) to lead a larger, more successful revolt later, in Wallace's name.
Media-val bias being what it is, the unreliable but royal Robert the Bruce became renown as a Scottish national hero, whereas the brave heart of peasant-ish William Wallace was barely remembered, until this film came out. At least that's the spin that Gibson puts on the material, that the true peoples' heroes -- warriors, freedom fighters, messiahs, (and filmmakers?) who don't back down or compromise their ethics -- often don't get their just reward in this life. That's a theme to ponder, but parents might emphasize to impressionable viewers that, while William Wallace apparently did exist, much of the script in BRAVEHEART has been shown to be false. So much so that a few hobbits, elves, and orcs might have participated, and it would not have made much difference.
Parents should also be reminded of the high level of blood and gore (animal and human), and sexual elements. Edward I's son Edward II (Peter Hanly) is a pampered homosexual who's such an ineffectual annoyance to Longshanks that the king kills his son's boyfriend by throwing him out the nearest window. Edward II is married, for strictly diplomatic reasons, to a beautiful French princess (Sophie Marceau) who sleeps with William Wallace and gets pregnant by him, another way by which the hero triumphs from beyond the grave.
Is a rigidly unbending stance always a good thing? Many less-spectacular movies have dramatized the dilemma, and one recent French entry on the topic (scrupulously based on historical fact), the tragic costume drama THE WIDOW OF ST. PIERRE is free of maulings and depravity.
Rate It!
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Sexual ContentMuch ado about rape, plus sex scenes between Wallace and his doomed wife and with a consenting princess. Some nudity. |
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ViolenceTorture, hackings, stabbings, throat-slitting, arrows and spears deal horrible death and injuries, though quick editing rarely lingers on the gore. |
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LanguageNot much, and mostly in archaic language. |
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Social BehaviorWilliam Wallace is brave, noble, but vengeful and absolutely uncompromising (although with enemies like these, who could blame him?). His strongest allies, like a displaced English-hating Irishman, are equally fanatical; others who turn out to be treacherous and unreliable live to tell the tale (unless William gets to them first). |
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Drug/Alcohol/TobaccoSocial drinking, or liquor used as a battlefield anesthetic. |
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