Braveheart - a Cinematic Anaylsis

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Mel Gibson's Braveheart is routinely named in polls of film critics as the worst movie ever to have won the Academy Award for best picture, and it is easy to see why. The acting in the film ranges from the blandly unmemorable to the mortifying. Sophie Marceau is luminously beautiful but dull in Braveheart--she reads like a second-rate Catherine Deneuve with all the blonde and all the crazy removed, and what is left over is not very interesting. When Marceau speaks English she sounds faintly like Madeline Kahn in Blazing Saddles or Gilda Radner voicing "Baba Wawa"; when she speaks French she seems a little more relaxed. Brian Cox is reliably good but seems to be hiding behind his beard, as though he were appearing in a particularly violent but nonetheless embarrassing Christmas episode of "Monarch of the Glen." Angus MacFadyen as Robert the Bruce seems to have confused bugging his eyes with something that might pass for acting. Patrick McGoohan strides around as though Edward Longshanks were the particularly grim Victorian protagonist of a Hammer horror film. Gibson uses Brendan Gleeson not as an actor, but more as a prop, a large lump of ginger suet to be ladled on whenever the film seems insufficiently Pictish. Gibson himself does not act so much as mug his way through Braveheart. His facial expressions are ludicrous: with his shaggy wild-man mullet, he looks like the late Phil Hartman playing the Cave Man Lawyer on amphetamines. His face is almost overexpressive: his eyes flash like a bipolar bartender out on a bender, or roll heavenward in a broad and wildly anachronistic faux-cute double-take, his forehead wrinkles like an accordion to express depth of thought, and just as in the Lethal Weapon movies Gibson seems to specializing in mimicking the facial contortions of a man being tortured. (The only difference is that, in the Lethal Weapon movies, he survives.) If the film had not won the Oscar, it would be termed "forgettable".

The crudity of Gibson's overall directorial style can be seen by contrasting the cinematography and editing from two scenes: the erotic encounter between William and his bride Murron, and the scene in which Edward Longshanks kills Philip. The sex scene finds Gibson as William roaming in the gloaming, whereupon he flirts with Catherine McCormack as Murron by tossing stones. The natural light filming here is used to great effect by filming during the actual gloaming, the quality of long twilight found in the northern highlands of Scotland, and thus their long kiss is filmed in dusky light. Soon they elope to the forest by night, where they pledge marriage vows with a friar (in again what seems to be a Shakespearean borrowing) beside a Celtic stone cross: the camera then pans out, leaving the framed figures in moonlight to hold in a tableau that looks like religious iconography. Gibson's production company is clearly called "Icon" for a reason. Then follows the most mortifying scene in the entire film, the sexual encounter in which Gibson and McCormack walk around naked by moonlight, in which their hairstyles and indeed their breasts look remarkably similar under slivers of silvery light. The simple answer here is that a frank sex scene would have broken the faux-primitive / pastoral magic of the film's utterly lurid (and dishonest) imagination of the past. Here, a manifestly un-sexy coupling--Wallace and Murron have no chemistry whatsoever, and Gibson merely looks elderly doing the playful stone toss to get her attention--is made to seem chastely erotic by the purposefully atmospheric lighting and framing. We can contrast this with the cinematography in a very different scene, one which is morally ugly rather than aesthetically ghastly, the scene where Edward Longshanks throws his son's catamite out the window. Here, Gibson is still filming by natural light: it is a bright sunny day outside, and indoors there are lit candles but the somber tones of the costumes here (like the Bayeux tapestry) are caught by the bright sunlight. The scene opens with Edward the Second fussing: then he sits down and pouts, pulling long faces like Carol Burnett until his father strides in the room. The scene pauses for a rustic messenger to deliver a scroll announcing the sack of York, and a severed head in a basket. This apparently prompts Philip (young Edward's boyfriend) into offering Baywatch-breathless political advice until Patrick McGoohan flings him off the roof, whereupon he lands as comically as the cow lands upon Graham Chapman in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It is a murder played for laughs, and the bright sunny light streaming in renders unreal the ensuing drama as young Edward pulls a dagger on his father and is slapped to the ground. Yet what astonishes is the long theatrical length of the scene here, with no change of location. The comedy lands so badly not only because it is morally offensive, but also because the dramaturgy here is as creaky and antiquated as a Feydeau farce.

On the basis of these two scenes it is possible to generalize about the editing: Gibson has a taste for long stretches of purely aestheticized schmaltz, with full-on mood lighting, constructed as manipulatively as possible, whether for a crude laugh or a ludicrous Thomas Kinkade-style descent into softcore erotica. The wooing of Murran by Wallace intersperses brief boring scenes devoted to plot, then wastes long stretches with dreary Celtic piping playing over two nude people demonstrating a complete lack of sexual chemistry by moonlight. The editing is usually content to show us everything, although there will be cutting away to imply unseen action, as in the final torturing of Wallace when we watch reaction shots--incluing the oddly sexual look of satisfaction on Murren's face as the axe comes down--which imply the grotesque tortures inflicted on his body while not showing a drop of blood.

The camera is usually angled wide to catch some more of the dreary Scottish countryside. Even when indoors for scenes involving the English villains, there is usually a wide frame so that we can see Edward the Second mincing around with his nonplussed bride and his hunky boy-toy. Most of the film takes place outdoors in natural light; the relatively small portion of the film which takes place indoors has effects intended to mimic the available sources of light in the middle ages. Firelight or torches are used; in the long and ludicrous sex scene between Wallace and his bride (before she is raped and killed by the English) Gibson contrives to film everything by moonlight. The color is largely lush and saturated, although dream sequences or certain sequences seen through the eyes of the young William Wallace are given an icy blue desaturated