How I Learned to Love—Or at Least Appreciate—Braveheart - Vanity Fair

Braveheart. Brave…heart. You have to admire a title that’s as quick to the chase as it is thematically apt. Mel Gibson’s Oscar-winning vanity epic turned 25 years old this month, which beckons the requisite quarter-life crisis and reconsideration—starting with that title, a perfect relic of its time. No word could be more suitable for a poster featuring Gibson’s war-grimed, purposeful face, in which the Brave and the Heart are perfectly apparent.

Though the title is apt, it’s also incorrect. “Braveheart,” the actual historical moniker, referred not to William Wallace (the rebellious Scottish knight whose life story Gibson ostensibly recounts in the movie), but to Robert the Bruce, played by Angus Macfadyen. Never mind that, though; there’s no use playing Jenga with the factual inconsistencies of this baffling, silly, defiantly satisfying movie. Braveheart is the kind of film that enjoys the irony of dropping lines like “history is written by those who hang the hero”—then doing fuck-all with history (and castrating the hero). Its appearance on a list of the most inaccurate movies ever, published more than 10 years ago, feels from our current vantage like a badge of honor. The movie predates the nit-sensitive era of internet fact-checking. It escaped Neil deGrasse Tyson–esque clapbacks questioning whether a heart, per se, really can be brave.

Which isn’t to say Braveheart has escaped time altogether; it hails, of course, from a more innocent era in which our feelings about Mel Gibson could be uncomplicated. Though I’m also not convinced it has aged totally poorly. As I rewatched the film, what I expected to play as pure camp only sort of played that way. Strip Braveheart of everything that’s bad or “wrong” about it, and you’ve stripped the movie of what makes it work. Gibson’s buoyant mane, the birdlike gaze and ethereal wandering of Princess Isabella (Sophie Marceau), the primal satisfaction of bad guys getting clubbed in the head precisely when the drama calls for it, the titular-but-not hero screaming “Freedom!” as he’s drawn and quartered…stick to history and much of this will get unceremoniously tossed, like Wallace’s gonads by the end of the movie. Which, I must confess, would almost—almost—be a shame. Because, though Gladiator asked it aloud first, Braveheart wears it better: Are you not entertained?

What Braveheart still has to offer us, once we wince through the “learned” Wallace romancing a woman in French and the regrettable (and apparently fictional) threats of primae noctis, are the basic, primal pleasures of Hollywood doing its thing—of the movie-star accoutrements a film like Braveheart is expressly designed to heighten. I find the violence in this movie pretty satisfying: angry, meaty, about as elegant as Gibson speaking French. We didn’t know he had a Passion of the Christ up his sleeve in 1995, but Braveheart on its own merits offers flashes of violence that pierce through the otherwise rote romanticism of Gibson’s filmmaking.

There’s something about the brazenness of all the slit throats, the horses getting lanced in their abundant chests, the heads getting clubbed to bits, all for the sake of freedom—a fungible concept if ever there were one. Especially in movies, which have a way of making us want to see ourselves in the rebels, to the detriment of our understanding who the rebels really are. History is written by the victors, just as Wallace’s dead father says early in the film. Hundreds of years and an industrial revolution later, the victors would begin writing history through movies—which would, in turn, have high stakes for a guy like Wallace, mostly unknown to modern audiences outside of Scotland until Mel Gibson, and now linked to this damn movie in perpetuity.

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