Jewish newspapers in the 1930s and 1940s featured a column called “Our Film Folk,” revealing to the delight of the readership that many of the Hollywood glitterati they loved were, in fact, fellow members of the Hebrew faith. A new version of”Our Film Folk” circulates these days in conversation, if not in print, among Americans of the conservative faith. The starboard leanings of Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger are long-established fact. But not until this summer did the doyens of the right discover they had a friend in Mel Gibson.
Mel Gibson! Once the Sexiest Man Alive, now among the five actors who can command $ 20 million a picture, he is that oxymoron in Hollywood, if nowhere else — to a limousine conservative. This 39-year-old producer/director — a father of six with his wife of 15 years — has opposed gun control, called President Clinton a “low level opportunist,” got involved in a public campaign against the regulatory powers of the Food and Drug Administration, railed about the weakening of his beloved Catholic Church, and uttered heresies like “feminists don’t like me and I don’t like them. I don’t get their point.”
Gibson has kept himself out of politics for the most part. He’s a little shy, famous for his desire for privacy, his general detestation of joinerism, and his loathing of the press.
He seems practically phobic about podiums, balloon-filled amphitheaters, and anything resembling a pigeonhole or a label. Rumors fly like Elvis sightings about his imminent entry into the fray, but his last foray into organized politics was in a 1987 campaign for an underdog, right/populist, Catholic candidate named Robert Taylor, and Gibson stomped away from that, calling the political process (everywhere) “really corrupt and horrible.”
He briefly dragged himself out of political seclusion last year when it looked like the vitamin and food supplements he had been using ing might be scared off the markeby new regulations from the always itchy-fingered FDA. A health nut whose movie-set trailers sometimes resemble intensive-care units for all their bottles of multi-colored capsules, Gibson starred in a nationally televised public service nnouncement in which he played an innocent citizen, in a scary, over-regulated future, whose house is invaded by a SWAT team seeking “contrband” vitamin C. The 60-second spot helped spark one of the most vigorous grass-roots mail and phone campaigns the Senate has ever seen, and eventually the FDA backed off.
Now Gibson has chosen to emerge from the ideological shadows in a surprising and impressive way — by directing and starring in a deeply felt epic about the 13th century Scottish revolutionary William Wallace and his rebellion against the English occupation of the Highlands. Braveheart, which is being rereleased this week, is a thoughtful disquisition on the nature and meaning of freedom. It comes as a particular shock, after 22 movies ranging from silly to pretty good, to see Gibson spring to life as a substantial film director on just his second venture behind the camera to a director comfortable with the interplay of such uncinematic subjects as politics, ideas, and justice.
Braveheart did not (fortunately for it) get the Pat Buchanan Forrest Gump Stamp of Approval for Promulgating Traditional Values, but it could have. Whatever one thinks of the movie as a whole — and one could take issue with the breathmint commercial look of the love scenes, or those backlit night shots with fog machines, featuring the Scotsmen striding to battle against the English in rock-video slo-mo — its treatment of politically risky subjects like male war lust and male-female sex differences is daring by Hollywood standards.
The film has many long, horrifying, but also what the New Yorker’s Anthony Lane rightly called “ebullient” scenes of the “13th century slugfest” mode of battle. Gibson and writer Randall Wallace do not feel they have to reinforce modern gender role rules by balancing troop sex ratios or providing equal opportunities for head-hacking. (Compare this with Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, another recent medieval epic. When Robin first meets Maid Marian, she is in chain mail drag, and they attempt to kill each other until she incapacitates him with a roundhouse knee to the groin.)
Women in Braveheart are at least as strong and admirable as the men, but they exercise their considerable powers in historically plausible ways: by causing men to fall in love with them, by cuckolding an evil husband and carrying the child of his enemy, by letting love-addled offcers prattle on about military secrets in bed.
The movie is also a paean to the powerful father. The father may be good (like Campbell, who fights alongside his son Hamish even after he loses his hand and takes an arrow in the chest) or detestable (like British king Edward I), but he is always a force to be reckoned with.
One would expect such a raw brew to shake things up, and it did. The arrows this time did not come from the feminists whom Gibson doesn’t like, but from a long-standing enemy: the radical gays. Or, more specifically, a group named GLAAD, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, which organized fervent pickets and leafleting in many cities to coincide with the Braveheart opening.
It’s not the first go-round for Gibson, GLAAD, and other gay groups. In 1991 GLAAD gave Gibson their GAG award for playing a swishy bartender in the movie Bird on a Wire. In 1992 he was named “Sissy of the Year” by the Advocate magazine, primarily for comments he had made the year before in an interview with Spain’s biggest newspaper, El Pais. “I became an actor despite” the possibility that people might think he was homosexual, he said then. “But with this look, who’s going to think I’m gay? Do I look like a homosexual? Do I talk like them? Do I move like them?”
Perhaps, after a lifetime of salacious and slightly condescending comments from reviewers about his adorable calves and eyelashes and eyes and rump and his general “prettiness,” Gibson is a little touchy about the suggestion that he has invited the attention. Nevertheless, contemporary etiquette dictates that upon making clear that one is not gay, one add hurriedly, la Seinfeld, the disclaimer, “Though there’s nothing wrong with that.”
But when asked, the next morning, on national TV, in another interview, whether he would apologize, Gibson refused. Then, he later told Playboy’s Lawrence Grobel, “the war started. Since then it’s made me totally paranoid. I’ve got to learn to keep my mouth shut.” He went on to talk darkly about organizations that “breathe down my neck,” about being chased on the highway, and the time he was booed, heckled, and spat upon outside Mann’s Chinese Theater during the ceremony in which he laid his palm print in the historic concrete of Hollywood Boulevard.
The war rumbles on. The latest exhibit in the gay case against Gibson is the portrayal of Edward II in Braveheart. GLAAD says that the film’s Edward II, the homosexual son of a warlike English king, is a “nightmarish stereotype,” “used as comic relief,” an offensive character whose weaknesses are used to counterpoint Mel’s machismo.” The din has been loud enough to fix the legend of Gibson’s “homophobia” in entertainment-industry conventional wisdom. In a guide to the city intended for visitors to New York’s Gay Pride Week celebrations, Newsday, for example, recommended Braveheart “for the self-loathing set who feel that no price is too great for a gander at Mel Gibson’s calves.”
Is Edward II actually used for “comic relief”? Historians and readers of Christopher Marlowe know that the young man was homosexual, and his sexuality has important plot ramifications in the movie. Given all that to given that we need to know quickly, via visual cues to the look, the lines, the direction of the character all seem relatively subtle. Yokels who find homosexuality and delicately featured men ipso facto a laff riot will titter when they watch Edward II; others with some sophistication who do not find homosexuality prima facie hilarious will understand that the character is supposed to be gay and then think no more about.
No, the obsessive quality of GLAAD’s rage may come from somewhere deeper — perhaps Gibson’s unreconstructed heterosexuality, augmented , by his lifelong allegiance to traditional Catholicism, has thrown up red flags for GLAAD. Gibson has a pre-60s aura of fecundity about him — he’s been married to Robyn, a former nurse’s aide, for 15 years, they oppose both birth control and abortion, and they have had six children. Gibson has said that he and his wife are happy to take “as many [children] as God wants to send.” Recent magazine profiles pick up on this angle with titles like “The Sexiest Daddy Alive.”
Surveying this chance collision of genes, character, and movie stardom, one has to wonder how it all came about. The answer starts, of course, with Gibson’s own father-one Hutton “Red” Gibson. Red seems to have leaped out of the pages of Paul Theroux’s novel The Mosquito Coast — the story of a brilliant, energetic, crazed iconoclast who picks up stakes and hauls his little clan into the bush.
Gibson has called his father “just a regular guy who worked long hours,” but Gibson Senior seems more colorful than that. “He lived through the Depression with a fayher who was dying and a brother who was a f — up,” Gibson told Playboy. “Goes off to Guadalcanal in World War Two, gets the Purple Heart for something — he doesn’t talk about it much. In the meantime he goes to a seminary because he’s very spiritual.”
After a return to the States, there were many jobs, from plumber to computer programmer. Red married Anne when she was 21, and Mel was born in a little town near Peekskill, New York, in 1956, the sixth of 11 children. (He has always been an American citizen, and thus, unlike Schwarzenegger, could run for President.) When Gibson Senior, by then a brakeman for the New York Central Railroad, suffered a job-ending back injury, he “kept his family in shoes and food” by getting himself on the game show Jeopardy in the mid 1960s, on which he won the then-enormous sum of $ 21,000.
By 1968, Red realized his injury prevented him from going back to the railroad, so he took his wife, his kids, and his Jeopardy winnings, and moved to Sydney, Australia, the home of his mother. He has lived in Australia ever since, founding an organization called Alliance for Catholic Tradition that opposes the reforms of Vatican II and writing books that Gibson Junior says try to correct “an institution [the Catholic Church] that has become unrecognizable to him.” The books have gone unpublished.
In Australia Gibson attended allboy Catholic schools through high school, where, he told Grobel, he was “not much of a conformist” and “got whacked around for smoking, fighting, not following their stupid rules.” At home there was plenty of brawling as well. “You don’t grow up in a crowd like that and not punch one another out all the time. . . . We’d just about kill each other. Very satisfying.” His parents “ran a pretty tight ship. They didn’t let us get away with anything. But it wasn’t like we had to shut up at mealtime. It was just kind of nutty”
“Spank kids?” Gibson has said. “You can’t raise a decent human being without it. I don’t butcher them. It’s not fun, is it?” You can also see the tough-love style in his direction of Braveheart’s battle scenes, filmed, on sodden Irish moors, where he ran up and down lines of heavily armed young men with a bullhorn yelling out, “If any of you hurts anybody I’ll kill you.”
There’s a certain look about Gibson; you can see it off-camera and in many of his characters, like the loner Mad Max or the battered but triumphant Wallace. Janet Maslin of the New York Times calls that quality “a stately worldweariness,” while her colleague Vincent Canby describes it as “the cool, infinitely pragmatic manner with which he deals with his existential situation.” His affect was evidently shaped by the Catholic ethos of worldly detachment, by a strong belief in God’s will above man’s– “My father told me very early on that it was a sin to worry too much” — and by being raised in a big family where “you realize that it doesn’t all get handed to you.”
“You always got what you need- ed,” Gibson says, “but you didn’t always get what you wanted.”
Until now, perhaps. Convention- al wisdom said that a $ 60 million movie of nearly three hours set in grotty Scotland in the grotty 13th century featuring some obscure historical guy who wears a skirt, talks in a nearly indecipherable accent, and is covered with mud most of the time, would be a box-offce disaster.This summer, before the rerelease, Braveheart took in about $ 60 million in the United States and about $ 20 million abroad.
The movie is a hit — not a blockbuster, but a hit. And since Gibson was able to pull it off, he has acquired the kind of clout which will give him the enviable freedom to direct movies he does not have to star in. There are three specific works in his sights, all literary adaptations. One is Fahrenheit 451, science-fiction novelist Ray Bradbury’s vision of a future PC world in which offensive books are burned. The second is Thank You For Smoking, Christopher Buckley’s satirical portrait of the tobacco lobby. Third is Anna Karenina, and perhaps only Hollywood’s most committed Catholic could do justice to the Tolstoy novel about love, death, and adultery — the novel with the epigram that reads, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord.”
Stephanie Gutmann is a New York writer.
