Released the same year as Braveheart, Rob Roy was overshadowed. I was not even aware of it until decades later. Hilariously, it now has one thing over Mel Gibson’s movie - I still have never seen Braveheart.
Rob Roy is not a secret masterpiece - but it is an interesting film.
While it utilises the tropes of various genres (the swashbuckler, the western), it also wants to ground itself in the specific historical context of Robert McGregor’s life and times. There is a focus on the gritty minutiae of everyday life, from showing multiple people having bowel movements, the number of supporting characters with terrible teeth, and the overall horrific treatment of women.
This film wants to make clear how tough this time period was just to live in. But these elements are ultimately purely aesthetic.
The portrayal of the title character does not have that level of grounding:
In contrast to everyone else in this world, he is a figure of virtue. He is a man of honour, who actually believes in the concept.
It marks him out from everyone else, particularly the nobles who use the class system to their advantage, using subterfuge and lies to achieve their aims without losing face.
Neeson gives the role gravitas - it is hard to imagine anyone else conveying the same level of sincerity; there is no ironic twinkle to his performance, or the movie around him.
But there is nothing to the character - there is no sense of real conflict or contradiction to him.
The film attempts to inject a certain emotional realism via his relationship with his wife Mary (Jessica Lange). During the film, she is assaulted by the film’s villain, and chooses to stay silent and not tell her husband what had happened. This is not just an act of self-preservation, but a realisation that Rob would stop at nothing to avenge her, luring him out of hiding to certain doom.
This movie is not so much revisionism as an act of myth-making - taking the story of a Celtic folk hero and creating a cinematic epic.
Rob Roy not having an arc is not necessarily a problem - I was expecting him to be more of a character like Superman. He would act as an example for the people around him to rise up against the nobles.
This never happens. The character Alisdair seems to be intended as the film’s point of comparison: his pride keeps getting in the way of helping Rob and his people (he sleeps through the attack on Rob and Mary’s home; his desire to make up for his failure leads to Rob’s capture, and the death of his compatriots).
One narrative thread the film - bafflingly - ignores, is Rob’s campaign stealing from the Marquess of Montrose (John Hurt). We are shown Rob’s initial decision, and the Marquess briefly grumbles about it, but we never see it.
It might just be the movie trying to avoid turning into Robin Hood, but it removes a certain sense of scale from Rob’s story.
THe central issue with the movie is that it feels like it has aspirations than acting as a straightforward genre piece. It has the shape of a western, but it does not want to give the same kind of catharsis.
The one aspect of the movie that is genuinely compelling is Tim Roth’s performance as foppish villain Archibald Cunningham. Portrayed as Rob’s opposite, he is the scion of a noblewoman who now works as a hatchet man for the Marquess (who, it is implied, may be his father).
An illegitimate child who does not know his father, he has allegiance to no one, and sees people as things to be used.
His dog-eat-dog worldview is the polar opposite of the noble McGregor, and gives the film its centre of conflict.
Roth plays him with a sense of self-loathing, and an acceptance of his own damnation (in one great scene, he grins down the barrel of a loaded pistol).
In a movie that only tips its claymore toward revisionism, his character is the real deal.
Directed by Michael Caton-Jones, Rob Roy is handsomely mounted, but it is ultimately too in awe of its subject to deliver something truly rousing.
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