USUALLY you wouldn't give a three-hour movie about a 13th-century Scottish folk hero much chance of setting cinema turnstiles whirling. But Mel Gibson's Braveheart is a textbook example of how a historical drama tailored to pleasure-seeking mainstream movie-goers can buck the odds.
In pre-devolution Scotland, Braveheart was an exotic, enthralling event even before the first scene had been shot. Gibson was spotted in Glasgow spending time with members of the clan Wallace, and crowds gathered at the film's Highland locations to c
atch a glimpse of Mad Mac. True, GIbson spent more time filming in Ireland than in the Scotland, thanks to tax incentives and the loan of 1,700 members of the Irish army, but Scotland left an impression on him all the same.
The sun shone on only three days of the 20-week shoot. The midges drove him daft, and some days he and the other actors were clad in little more than kilts and sleeveless shirts while fire hoses aimed iced water at them. Gibson pulled a groin muscle getting on a horse, got hit by a cabbage fired from a cannonball in a mob scene and all the time had to deal with Hollywood executives unnerved by "Mel in a skirt" dying a graphically violent death so that others might live to fight another day: thus making Braveheart a one-shot project with no sequel potential.
If Braveheart were any longer, it would have to be moved around in a forklift truck. At times, an obsessive ode toGibson's machismo, there's still no denying that the movie is an eyeful. The battle scenes are staged with enough dramatic sweep to make De Mille envious, and the kind of violent excitement you remember from movies like Alexander Nevsky and The Seven Samurai, cutting artfully between intimate clashes and mass patterns with skies of hailing arrows, ramparts of sharpened spears and arcing broadswords swinging away like helicopter blades. At the front of all this mayhem are Gibson and his shaggy fellow liberators, a wild bunch so butch you could grow a beard just standing next to burly Hamish (Brendan Gleeson), the Irish hothead Stephen (David O'Hara) and the old warrior Campbell (James Cosmo), who pulled arrows from his chest with his bare hands. And who else but Gibson would interrupt one of his bellicose battle scenes to make sure we heard the "plonk" of a stone hitting an English helmet?
In actual history, England's King Edward came up with the idea of parliament, but in Braveheart he was a gnarly terror with a gay caricature of a son who is so often the butt of cheap homophobic gags that when his father cautions him that he may one day become king, you half expect him to add "or queen".
Other small liberties include removing a bridge from one famous conflict because it was judged insufficiently cinematic, transmuting the Battle of Stirling Bridge into the Battle of the Big Field. There were also more inventive flights of fancy, such as the affair between Wallace and Isabelle, the Princess of Wales (Sophie Marceau). Theirs is a whirlwind romance: they meet, they're in love, she's pregnant, she's gone. No wonder: in reality the two never met; Wallace was already several years dead when Isabelle first landed in the British Isles.
The Scottish actor-director Peter Mullan recalls bantering with Gibson over his fast and loose approach to Scots history. On-screen, Mullan is the soldier who tells Gibson he's not tall enough to be the real William Wallace. Off-screen, he gave the directory pelters for showing kilts several centuries too early and wearing woad several centuries after we had put aside our blue poster paint. And so on, and on.
The ideas in Braveheart are relatively simple – they boil down to "freedom" (the last word on the tongue of Wallace) and the right of self-determination for Scots. This is historical codswallop. The wars of Edward of England and the Scots under Robert the Bruce were wars between Norman-descended feudal nobles. The very idea of freedom for the peasants would have been beyond the conception of any of them. But the SNP adored the heroism, forcing GIbson to perform some fancy footwork when he returned to Scotland for the Stirling première.
His first was when the movie, strung across three cinemas, broke down. To fill in time, Gibson wandered on to the stage to crack jokes and perform a soft-shoe shuffle. Later I danced an eightsome reel with Gibson at the bibulous party in Stirling Castle, with the emphasis on "reel". The following day we recorded an interview where Gibson, anxious to keep his film apolitical, expressed diplomatic dismay that the Scottish Nationalists has used his première as a leaflet drop for the party. "I think that's pretty cheeky," he complained to me. "That wasn't the intention of my film."
Braveheart went on to win five Oscars, including best picture and best director, but in all honesty it wasn't even the best Scottish picture in 1995 – Michael Caton-Jones's Rob Roy was more ambitious, far less bombastic and much better acted. And the following year both were eclipsed by Trainspotting, a vital modern movie that made this country positively cool.
But 15 years after it was shot, Braveheart is still mentioned by visitors to Scotland as a reason for their trip. Hollywood, it turns out, is the Scottish tourist board's greatest ally. It may be bad history, but it is Braveheart's rollicking bravado that made Scotland seem bloody exciting. And if nothing else, the film put to rest the world's curiosity about what Scotsmen wear under their kilts, even though I have the gravest doubts that a 13th-century Scottish rebel would instruct his troops to moon the English at the beginning of battle, reinforcing the idea that under our anoraks beat the heart of warrior Scots – but those people mooning out of a rugby-club bus window are probably Scots too.
It's odd to reflect that it needed a tormented alcoholic American to introduce our modest nation to the notion of flamboyant hyperbolic myth-making – but Gibson's Braveheart undoubtedly gave Scotland a belief in itself.
This article was first published in Scotland on Sunday on 25 October 2009