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Rating: Why does Mel Gibson keep making films? I suspect that he is recommended by someone. At the top, very high up. This would explain his "Passion of the Christ," an embarrassing if not worse film. Yes, Mel Gibson. Aside from two films, the first "Mad Max," "Gallipoli," and "Lethal Weapon" (the first, not the subsequent clones), we could well do without this muscular American. Yet we still find him around, and it’s partly the audience’s fault. That audience which flocked en masse to see his films, especially "Braveheart," which is a flop, but which everyone praises as "huge," "superb," "grand," "spectacular."
1. Randall Wallace, future director of "The Man in the Iron Mask," in addition to being a poor actor director, is also a lousy screenwriter. He’s the one who writes "Braveheart" (together with his partner Mel), and he writes it terribly. Because the little story after half an hour is already no longer sustainable, becoming a continuous alternation between battle scenes and love phrases, but Mel borders on the ridiculous with those kisses under the rain with Sophie Marceau (who might still think she’s in 1980’s "La Boum"), with those little phrases like "don’t leave me" or the simpler and conventional "I love you." Stuff for romance novels, maybe that’s also why women swooned?
2. The battle scenes. Now, it has been said that the battle scenes in this film are true masterpieces of staging. But here it is more about historical ignorance than real cinematic knowledge. And Mel knows which audience he has to speak to. The audience that settles, believing they are witnessing a masterpiece of direction. But Mel is a sly one, someone who studied all the battle scenes from famous films thoroughly and tried to mix them together. Result? A disaster. Because it is clear that Mel has taken notes by watching "Alexander Nevsky" by Eisenstein, "Falstaff" by Orson Welles, and "Lancelot of the Lake" by Bresson, and it's also clear that Mel Gibson is neither Eisenstein, Welles, nor Bresson. Because, if those were the greatest battle scenes ever seen in cinema (true masterpieces of direction, studied frame by frame, with a monstrous epic breath), with "Braveheart" we are facing the aping of great cinema, the most shameless plagiarism, swallowed by a seemingly uninformed audience who bought it all.
3. Rhetoric flows like rivers, ambitions as well. Anything could have been said about Scotland’s independence, but clichés could have been avoided. But with Mel, you have to be on guard. And here comes the finale, rhetorical indeed. The death live, perfect sadism, the harrowing final torture (which already foreshadowed future bloody Christian events) that the usual poorly informed public loved so much.
Because, aside from his lack of expertise in directorial art (it would take hours to write about how Mel is not a director but rather a mediocre sly one, given that serious directing is something else), but how is it possible to entertain the audience for twenty minutes with all sorts of torture? It takes skill, a certain craft, to create the pathos, the anticipation. In Michael Cimino’s "The Deer Hunter," the great American director managed to create suspense and emotion during the famous Russian roulette scene through scientific camera movements, but I could cite a thousand other examples: Sergio Leone, Hitchcock’s "North by Northwest," Kubrick. Mel Gibson doesn’t even know what it means to sit down and study how to shoot a sequence millisecond by millisecond, his is an elementary, crude, superficial cinematic vision. The finale of "Braveheart" is a glaring example: it does not create pathos, emotion, it only creates a bit of discomfort in the viewer (the usual trick of "the more I show suffering, the more people suffer"), but it's regression, it's a complete disregard for sixty years of directorial progress. And, as a proper conclusion, the sword thrown into nothingness amidst the Scottish landscape: the same rhetoric Spielberg or similar use when they show the waving American flag.
Then again, the film won 5 Oscars, 90% of those who saw it consider it a masterpiece. Nothing to say. But three points needed to be made. Also because many still consider it a masterpiece. And then, just thinking this is the favorite film of the Lega Nord, and that these guys make their electoral commercials by copying entire lines from the film gives me chills, beyond any directorial considerations.
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