11694 FULLOSIA PRESS: The Patriot A Review

The Patriot Under Fire

The English can't keep a stiff upper lip over the Independence Day release The Patriot, the epic tale. Moaning that the film is "Gratuitously anti-British" and a Hollywood vision of "excessive violence is all too real," Brits say Mel Gibson emerged from playing the Scottish rebel Wallace as a stock anti-British character. Seemingly all the sneering, smirking, evil villains speak the Kings English.

Trans-Atlantic Attack

Within America's borders, director Spike Lee mounts an attack on The Patriot. "Where are all the blacks?," the noted director asks.

The Patriot shows the struggle between British Colonel Tarleton and American Major Francis Marion for control of the Carolinas.

The Patriot's Colonel Tavington is based on the very real life exploits of Colonel Banastre "The Butcher" Tarleton. Dubbed "Bloody Benny" Tarleton's slaughter of surrendering American cavalry at the Waxhaws made him one of the most feared Brish officers.

The historical Banaster Tarleton is a complex character,,, Yet Tarleton the defender of the monarchy was no aristocrat but of the same general merchant class that supported the revolution

Power said the African leader Nkrumhar is like an egg held in the palm of your hand: clutched too tight it fragments; held too loosely it slips away.

Excesses sometimes cow an enemy ; sometimes they encourage resistence,,,

Tarleton certainly scared off many faint of heart, but what remained behind to fight him in the swamps and forests were uniquely determined to fire off a few shots melt away and send The Scarlet Wonder Tarleton charging aimlessly about looking for a vanished enemy already in position for its next ambush

The Patriot's considerable emotional force stems from sheer rage, an unforgiving anger,,,

Yet British critics are correct in one sense. The historical "Swamp Fox" Francis Marion who in the Longfellow poem sent a shiver to the timbers of the British foeman with his very name, discouraged personal feud. There was none of the in-your face repartees ,,, Contact with the British was so distant that Marion's sword rusted into his scabbard.

This core message about the origins of the Republic, however is its historical roots in real-time, real-place communities.

As far as the violence, this was a Revolution chock full of it. The Revolution by no means was a series of parades, speeches and declaration. The namby-pams among the Wall Street Journal editors who cluctch medalions of their ancestors might like to forget the Revolution was a violent, devisive event.