Mel Gibson says that Braveheart's William Wallace was pure fantasy ... and swings the pendulum too far the other way

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/scotland/article6890067.ece

So now Gibson has said that William Wallace was a monster and that he fictionalized all sorts of things about him to make him the hero and easier to root for because someone has to be the good guy and someone has to be the bad guy because that's how stories are told.

Except that, well, no, that doesn't have to be true in the binary terms that Gibson set up in Braveheart. Historical fictions in drama can serve a purpose and it can serve a purpose to consider one person a villian and another person a hero yet to say that Hollywood story-telling requires a clear cut bad guy and good guy is overstating the case a bit much. There is still room for shades of gray, even greatly contrasting shades of gray. I'm going to make my polemic against Gibson extreme to point out what I'm talking about. The last ten years have seen more moral nuance in the character development of superheroes than you see in William Wallace. There's more plausibly psychological tension and ambiguity in Batman, Spiderman, Doctor Octopus, Harvey Dent, Harry Osbourn, or even Hellboy than in William Wallace. There was more pyschological nuance and depth of story-telling in Toy Story that year than in Braveheart.

But for Gibson to go the other way from his simplistic jingoism and say Wallace was a monster is also cheating. As C. S. Lewis used to put it, the mark of a great villain is someone who COULD have been a great hero but chose a different path than the hero's path. It is also a truism with cause that one person's hero is another person's villain. Gibson's simplification comes from what you might expect of a man who spent his life doing action movies where black and white must win out over shades of gray.

Gibson's cartoony depiction of Wallace and "history" is shown for being the cartoon that it is if you compare the moral universe of Braveheart to Toy Story. Yes, I'm going to hammer that one because I have rarely seen a canard more persistent than the idea that cartoons are for children or childish and lack the "adult" sensibility of "adult" story-telling. Most "adult" films are not as well-paced or written as films for children because the adult crutches of sex and violence, sexy violence, or violent sex are not at disposal, devices that Braveheart used lavishly within the realm of a mainstream theatrical release.

I could be more simply dismissive of Gibson's fantasy on William Wallace were it not for the fact that there was a William Wallace II.