Film review - Braveheart

Scots films and English reviewers
Part 1: Oor Wullie

After last year's Oscars, I suppose I had to see it.

Not since "Your life in their hands" -- a TV programme taking you through surgical operations as an observer, with real film, put on deliberately late when I was a child at night so tots wouldn't learn how to open the vena cava -- have I so marvelled at the human body. So many bits, aren't there? And so ... detachable. They didn't have videos in 1305, so I suppose detaching the odd bodily organ was their idea of fun. Saturday Night Dead, you might say.

"What'ya ginna du tonigh', eh, big yun?"

"Ach, I dunnoo, thinga. I think I'll go down the pub and slice off a few legs."

This film had it all: arms, legs, heads, torsos, together and separate, usually in red. The best bits were where we got to see the severance itself, complete with authentic renderings of the effect of blood pressure: the best bits. The bits that obviously won four Oscars.

And anger. Yes, that's it. Plenty of anger. And vengeance. If we came out of The Deer Hunter wanting to kill anything looking vaguely oriental, Braveheart left one longing for the blood of an Englishman. Or several hundred.

You sort of suspected, when at the beginning Uncle Argyll (you could tell from the socks) tells Oor Wullie that to learn to fight with this (indicating his sword), you have to learn to use this (indicating his head) that we were in for a film about character development and all that sort of erudite stuff. I thought Uncle meant your own head, i.e. the brain inside. I obviously misunderstood: he meant your opponent's head, and by use it he meant, ... well, ... sever it. Clever man. No messing about with stop-gap measures like blows to the spleen or severed hamstrings. Straight to the point, and economic on sharp swords too.

The plot was, well, there. I found myself reaching for my Keith Feiling History of England to check what a baddy old Longshanks was, and what a wet his son Ned the Two was. It was all there. I may as well quote: "Unless we banish morals from history, some connection must exist between national fortunes and national character, though to distinguish cause and effect is more hazardous. � But we cannot fail to be impressed by the dearth of heroic, or even ordinarily honest, men at the head of fourteenth-century England; the good qualities had to fight their way to the upper air." Says it all, really.

This film banished history from morals, and fact from fiction. As for good qualities, there was one scene where Edward didn't nail his son's head to the floor or screw his pelvis to a siege engine. And there was another scene where Ned the Lad didn't pout. That was when Ned the Bad threw his best fwiend Phwilip out the window. (They didn't have glass in them in 1305. Well, I suppose some of them did, but this one conveniently didn't.)

Fighting their way to the top? The good qualities were having a hard time in this film. But then it was only the beginning of the century.

After two hours of vague rage and rain, I was left with the impression that the fourteenth century - quite apart from the quality of dentistry at the time - had little to recommend it, and that the twentieth century, all things considered, by and large, and on the whole, is perhaps not such a bad place after all, despite the threat of nuclear annihilation. At least it's painless.

For example, people don't usually ride their horse into my bedroom at 3 am and stove my head in with an iron ball on a chain stolen from a building site, and then ride out of the window into the duck pond below. There may well be people who want to do that sort of thing, and I suppose in a free world there ought to be a place for them to go and do it, but I don't think that should be in my bedroom, that's all.

Then there's the question of My Idea Of A Good Time With The Lads. For me that has to involve at least some intelligent conversation, and even a few jokes, and perhaps a good bottle of Chardonnay. It does not normally encompass nutting one another in the face with the forehead, tossing rocks onto one another's feet, or firing arrows into one another's chest to See Who Can Do It Without Hitting Anything Vital And Pulling The Shaft Out On Your Own. That game we always avoided when I was a Lad, as Mum would not have liked the mess on our shirts. Not so Oor Wullie. His pi�ce de r�sistance (he speaks French) is to lob rocks at people's heads at high speed, and Oh How They All Laugh at fat old Hamish who misses when he throws the sofa at his lifelong bosom pal'n'clansman! What laughs!

Bluff, tough and gruff, this lot. Rob Roy eat your heart out (before Wullie and his gang do it for you). Wullie Wallace is also a tuogh man and takes no shit, is a man of honour and not to be trifled with or demeaned in any way. So don't get any ideas.

We used to go on holidays to Scotland when I was a boy. Apart from one glorious fortnight spent in Mallaig in mid-June in blazing sunshine, my main memories are of mist, cold, and rain. Lots of rain, yes. You'd think they had more words for it, it comes in so many different forms there. But just good old four-letter-word rain will normally do. Cold too, now I think of it. Not the sort of place you'd want to strut about in with your strides round your ankles.

Which is why it seems odd that both Braveheart and Rob Roy seemed intent on convincing us all that shagging out in the open is the principal pastime indulged in by locals (and presumably visitors, wanted and unwanted) on the Scottish moors. Obviously those kilts are waterproofed on the inside. And probably centrally heated. It's the only explanation. Otherwise they could never go three rounds in the mud and gore of Glencoe without contracting double pneumonia. Maybe such extreme damp and cold is an effective contraceptive? Who knows.

There was much rapine and pillaging by bad Englishmen, though obviously none by the Scots (York was taken without a single swordstroke out of place and in full respect for all the Geneva Conventions and Protocols thereto).

I mentioned the plot. I have to confess that I strongly suspect that Gibson hired a special script editor, after the whole thing had been written, instructing them to go through it with a toothcomb and cut every factual reference that might have snuck in: the Pope went straight out the window with the horse (no reference was made to Pope Boniface's declaration of Scotland as a papal protectorate to thwart Ned the Bad's designs on bits of France); the recent conquest of Wales was totally ignored ("the Welsh will land here" was a bit odd in the circumstances); Ned the Lad obviously had a problem in addition to his homicidal pater, but we got no inkling of his liking for boys, Piers Gaveston or any of the dirt that made Marlowe's play so memorable. Of Simon de Montfort's legacy and Edward's foresight in matters of law and constitution we saw nothing. Nor did we hear of the seizure of the Pope by the French and his imprisonment in Avignon. Instead, apart from the usual sounds people make when they are having their heads stoved in with balls on chains, the dialogue was kept to shouts of great joy and mirth, hearty thwacks on the head and other routines otherwise seen only in Dinosaurs.

Did I say dialogue? "You tell your English King that sdkjfh d�s oi s�ov ihf�ovnfu v� j�dflvf�k j n ughhhh!" was a recurring phrase. As for the Scottish nobles, "They couldn't agree on the colour of shite!" must have got a good laugh in the one-and-ninepennies. "Aaaaaaagggggghhhhhhh!" was also a frequent ejaculation much resorted to. "Uuuugh-ya!" was obviously the right thing to say when dismembering an opponent with a claymore.

I was reminded of an exercise in English class at school. We had a rather trendy English teacher with many unfortunate ideas about self-expression and creativity, who divided us up into groups of five, each of which had to write and perform a brief five-minute play. I was, by sheer physical proximity in the classroom, lumped with four other characters whose favourite TV programme of the time was The Sweeney, an amusing account of the bluff, tough and gruff world of plain-clothes police in London fighting organized crime, which normally involved ample supplies of sawn-off shotguns and heavies with muscles in their spit. The result of our endeavours was a playlet that made up in action for what it so obviously lacked in plot and eloquence. We were thieves robbing a store with a night watchman or three, who got clobbered in round one. The rest of the play was our fight with the police who were waiting (this was a real challenge with only five of us); we had no computers to turn us into a mel�e of 20 thugs, but we invoked Shakespearian practice, suspended disbelief and made enough noise (""Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaagggggghhhhhhhh", "Uuuugh-ya!" and "Upyathwaaaaaa!!!") to convince even the most doubting. Sic Braveheart. The Ibrox Park on a Saturday afternoon would have problems competing with Mel's mel�e when they storm into battle. "A film is a story told in pictures." This one was told in comic strips.

I wondered about non-UK audiences watching this film. Thanks to the educational content of this film, they may possibly have got a vague idea that England is to the south of Scotland, and that the two peoples were having a bit of a disagreement back in the 1290s. They may also have got the impression that the English were perhaps a bit harsh and overzealous in their pursuit of war. I wonder, though, whether it served simply to reinforce the claim that the English are out to take over the world again, using the UN to do it for them, simply because they are sore at America for coming in and winning the war for them when they were having such a jolly time back in 1942.

I imagine therefore that the video of this film is doing well in the rentals out in places where the local militia are printing Mickey Mouse money and swearing allegiance to Thor while violently withholding their taxes and walking around refusing to recognize the jurisdiction of what Huck Finn's father called the Gummint.

The film was a lie from start to finish. Wallace was himself the son of an English knightly family, not a Scots layabout bearing more resemblance to a football hooligan. He killed priests, if they were English, and had the skin of Cressingham (the English leader he defeated at Stirling) tanned into sword belts. Still, at least he knew how to say that in Latin. And French. But so much for the Geneva Convention. In Scotland, too, it seems the good qualities had to fight their way to the upper air.

Review of Rob Roy