hen Mel Gibson came out with Braveheart in 1995, some conservatives felt that Hollywood had finally made a movie just for them. The film celebrated a definition of liberty strictly at odds with the popular definition. Liberty as defined by Hollywood means the ability of an individual to do whatever floats his boat without being judged or interfered with. But when William Wallace made his defiant and exhilarating cry for “Freedom!” at the end of the film (while being literally disemboweled), he was referring not to individual liberty but to the right of self-governing communities to be left alone by outside authorities.

Many of us hoped that Gibson’s new movie, The Patriot, would do for America what Braveheart did for Scotland. Written by Robert Rodat, who penned Saving Private Ryan, and directed by Roland Emmerich, the director of Independence Day, The Patriot promised to be the sort of film that would find Pat Buchanan camping out in his sleeping bag to get a choice seat. But while the film is enjoyable, its virtues as a conservative battle cry are disappointingly ambiguous.

The Patriot tells the story of Benjamin Martin (Gibson), a South Carolina widower and plantation owner content to spend his days taking care of his seven children and constructing a rocking chair in his spare time. A legendary veteran of the French and Indian wars, and author of no small number of atrocities in the old days, Martin is today a mature American patriot who believes that independence from Britain is the right course. But as this can be achieved only through a bloody war fought “among our homes” — thus putting his family at risk — he will have no part of it.

Predictably, his oldest son is as headstrong as his father once was and is determined to fight for truth, justice, and what he hopes will become the American way. Father and son argue at length, but what finally settles it for the Gibson character is the remorseless cruelty of the British, especially in the form of Col. William Tavington, played perfectly by Jason Isaacs. (It is a tragedy that Hollywood could never produce a single Communist character as thoroughly rotten as Tavington, but that’s another story.) Tavington is a loose cannon in Gen. Cornwallis’s arsenal, and his effective but shortsighted tactics rouse the anger of the populace. Under Tavington, the British kill American prisoners, American wounded, American slaves, American children. Eventually they drag Martin into the fight, and they are much the sorrier for it. He is an adept backwoods warrior, hiding his militia in the swamps and employing unconventional methods against the rigid British. He quickly earns the name “The Ghost” for his ability to harass the Redcoat columns and then vanish. One of the few almost-subtle themes of The Patriot is the “Don’t Tread on Me” style of warfare of the revolutionaries — perhaps the first victory of a loosely organized, largely agricultural people over a world-spanning empire. Gen. Cornwallis, enjoyably played by Tom Wilkinson, is a gentleman-soldier who cannot fathom why the Americans would break the long-established rules of war just to protect their homes. All of this plays out against a lush historical backdrop and the most fighting-while-running-through-woods since Last of the Mohicans. America wins in the end, the new world is born, and the torch of liberty has been lit.

What conservatives should especially appreciate is that in many respects the film is unapologetically out of step with today’s Hollywood. There are some G-rated kissing jokes, but nothing that would jeopardize a two-thumbs-up from the Family Research Council. When Martin’s son spends the night in his girlfriend’s home, he is first sewn up head-to-toe in a gunnysack — call it the first full-body condom. This unusual modesty reflects both Gibson’s own staunchly Catholic sensibilities (he, like Benjamin Martin, has seven kids) and a desire to pack the theater with families — not exactly a revolution against Hollywood’s liberal mores, but refreshing nonetheless. Indeed, while it may be technologically more lavish than previous films about the period — its battle scenes are far more realistic — The Patriot, in dialogue, plot, and themes, is a throwback to the days when Hollywood made movies where America’s moral superiority was never in doubt.

This point has not been lost on the British press, which is livid about the film. One headline blares, “HOLLYWOOD’S RACIST LIES ABOUT BRITAIN AND THE BRITISH.” This sensitivity is not altogether misplaced: The British have long been unfairly characterized as villains by Hollywood, and Gibson’s recent films display a distinctly anti-British bias. (Braveheart was far from a love letter to Britannia’s restraint and virtue.)

But it is really American anti-Americans who must feel the most aggrieved, because the film honors what is to the Left that great moment of original sin: the American Founding. The Patriot’s heroes are the very dead white males who have lately been purged from so much of the historical record. The American patriots in this film are decent and likeable and have the courage of their convictions. Racism is not the North Star of their existence, and greed is not the dominant theme of their lives. In other words, The Patriot propounds a view of the American Revolution not found in most college syllabuses.

Not surprisingly, the film has already become a political flashpoint. A preview audience in L.A. was reportedly horrified by the depiction of Martin’s young boys shooting and killing British soldiers (“Aim for the officers,” is Dad’s advice). Surely, muttered many a Hollywood liberal, a scene like this should have been avoided in the wake of Columbine. But Gibson defended the scene, saying he took his own kids shooting. And reports of Hollywood’s dismay brought Second Amendment partisans to Gibson’s side even before the movie opened. “I highly recommend this movie to any and all conservatives,” wrote Nicholas Sanchez, a columnist for the Free Congress Foundation. “No, I have not yet seen it. But from what I have read, it is already upsetting people that need to be upset.”

Nevertheless the film falls short of a full-throated defense of the American patriots as they actually were. This is most clearly revealed in its patently anachronistic treatment of blacks. A major subplot involves a slave named Occam, who has been signed over to Martin’s militia. At first he fights because he has no choice; then because he learns he will be freed if he serves twelve months; and finally because he believes in the cause. Martin’s oldest son convinces Occam that once the hated British are removed, America will live up to its New World promise and become a land of liberty where blacks and whites will live in harmony. The anachronism is palpable for everyone in the audience: Considerations about civil liberty for blacks, especially in South Carolina, are about 19 decades premature.

The charge of moral hypocrisy on race has been the main point in the Left’s indictment of the Founding. It even divides many conservatives in debates about the meaning of the Declaration of Independence. The Patriot handles this delicate problem by trying to take it off the table. Thus the British (who banned slavery and fought the slave trade long before we did) are more cruel to blacks in Gibson’s film than the Americans are. Not only that, Benjamin Martin himself doesn’t own any slaves. His South Carolina plantation is worked by free black men who make an honest living and are grateful for it. At movie’s end, Occam and Martin’s black workers return to the razed plantation to commence building “the new world” — starting with Martin’s plantation house. Thus the political motives of the War of Independence are blurred with those of the Civil War.

Race is also the reason the Braveheart theory of freedom cannot be found in The Patriot. Martin does not fight for principle or country — at least not at first — but for vengeance. The relevant political institution is not South Carolina, but the family. This seems like a pretty serious cop-out for a film called “The Patriot.”

The Patriot was originally intended to be the true story of Francis Marion, the South Carolina militiaman known as “The Swamp Fox.” (Marion was the subject of a 1950s Disney TV series, The Swamp Fox, starring Leslie Nielson. Theme song: “Swamp Fox, Swamp Fox, tail on his hat! Nobody knows where the Swamp Fox is at!”) Alas, the real story of Francis Marion is an unsavory tale of barbarity: Marion relished butchering Indians and raped his female slaves. An unnamed executive at Sony Pictures told the London Express that the studio brass “couldn’t go ahead once historians gave them chapter and verse on the life of the Swamp Fox.” So they changed the hero’s name to Benjamin Martin; switched his nom de guerre to “The Ghost”; freed his slaves; and used liberal Hollywood’s own anachronistic techniques to sugarcoat the pill of libertarian conservatism for modern audiences.

The Patriot is fun to watch, and it will be equally fun to watch the Left hate it. But it is neither the success it could have been nor the success that some conservatives may claim. By making the Founding a personal story of libertarian anti-statism, the film’s producers missed the opportunity to affirm that the seeds of true equality were planted in the Revolution. It may be unfortunate that freedom wasn’t universal from the outset, but we could use more honest celebration of the fact that the seeds were planted at all.