Critical Reception and Legacy (Braveheart) Braveheart (1995)
Braveheart opened May 24, 1995 to strong reviews, finished its theatrical run with approximately $213 million worldwide on a $72 million budget, and won five Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director at the 68th ceremony in March 1996. Its critical legacy has shifted twice since — once around 2000 as the historical-accuracy critique built, and again after 2006 in light of Mel Gibson's public conduct — without ever fully detaching from its status as the most influential historical-frontier epic of the 1990s.
The contemporary reviews
Roger Ebert gave the film three and a half stars and called it "one of the most spectacular entertainments of recent years":
"Mel Gibson's Braveheart is a full-throated, red-blooded battle epic about William Wallace, the legendary Scots warrior who led his nation into battle against the English in the years around 1300. It's an action epic with the spirit of The Road Warrior and the romantic idealism of Robin Hood." — Roger Ebert, RogerEbert.com (1995)
Janet Maslin in the New York Times gave the film a generally positive review with reservations about the running time and the gore:
"Braveheart, the second film he has directed, is an old-fashioned bloodbath... It is also exactly the kind of film at which Hollywood used to excel and toward which Mr. Gibson, who has so much real respect for that lost tradition, has set his sights." — Janet Maslin, The New York Times (1995)
The Sight & Sound review, by Mark Cousins, was the most enthusiastic of the major British critical responses:
"Braveheart is the largest historical-epic achievement of the year and one of the largest of the decade. Gibson, in his second feature, has made a film that demonstrates an instinct for scale and an eye for the bounded image that older directors at the same scale have not always managed." — Mark Cousins, Sight & Sound (1995, archived from print)
The principal contemporary dissents came from the historical-accuracy register. Sharon Krossa's "Braveheart Errors" essay, first published in 1997 and updated several times since, became the canonical document of the film's departures from the historical record (see Wallace and the Real History for the full list).
"Braveheart is to the history of William Wallace what The Sound of Music is to the history of the Anschluss: pretty, popular, and very loosely related to what actually happened. This is not a criticism. It is a genre note." — Sharon Krossa, Medieval Scotland (1997, updated 2002)
The Oscars and the box office
The 68th Academy Awards on March 25, 1996 gave Braveheart five Oscars: Best Picture, Best Director (Gibson), Best Cinematography (John Toll (in Braveheart)), Best Makeup, and Best Sound Effects Editing. It was nominated for ten total. (See Five Best Picture and the 1995 Oscars for the full breakdown of the awards race and the field.)
The box office had a long curve. The film opened at #2 in the U.S. behind Casper, did $9.9 million on the opening weekend, and built its U.S. gross to $75.6 million through a long theatrical run into August. International grosses brought the worldwide total to roughly $213 million, with strong performances in the UK, Australia, and Western Europe.
The Scotland reaction
The Scottish reaction at release was mixed. The film coincided with the run-up to the 1997 devolution referendum that established the Scottish Parliament, and several political commentators connected the two — David Hutchison in The Herald called the film "the most influential political document of the devolution decade," though he was being only partly serious. The Scottish National Party used the film's iconography in subsequent campaigns; Alex Salmond, then SNP leader, distributed leaflets featuring Gibson in blue paint during the 1995 by-elections.
"We did not need Braveheart to win devolution. But the film did not hurt. The man on the screen and the country in the polling booth were not the same man, but they shared a face for a few months in 1995." — Alex Salmond, The Scotsman (2014, archived)
The historical Scotland response — the Wallace Monument at Stirling, the Edinburgh Castle museum, the National Library of Scotland — was distinct from the political response. Several institutions issued formal corrections to the film's historical content during its theatrical run; the National Wallace Monument's website maintains a "Braveheart vs. History" guide that has now been online for two decades.
The post-2006 re-evaluation
Mel Gibson's 2006 antisemitic-tirade arrest and the subsequent reporting on his domestic conduct in the late 2000s reshaped the critical reception of his pre-2006 films. Braveheart was the principal pre-2006 film whose reception had to be re-examined; the question that has been asked, intermittently, since 2006 is whether the film's reception in 1995 should be retrospectively discounted in light of what was learned about its director ten years later.
The argument has run in both directions. Some critics — particularly those writing in the immediate aftermath of 2006 — have argued that Braveheart's anti-English-institutional politics, the "homophobic-coded" framing of Edward II, and the visual violence read differently after Gibson's recorded statements. Others have argued that the film stands or falls on its 1995 terms and that the 2006 arrest is a separate question.
"The question of how to read a director's earlier work in light of later conduct is one of the hardest questions in film criticism. Braveheart is one of the test cases. There is no clean answer. The film exists; what we now know about its director also exists. Both have to be carried." — A.O. Scott, The New York Times (2016, archived)
The framework legacy
The framework reading on this wiki — that Braveheart is the most successful "better tools, sufficient" execution of the 1990s — is, in critical-history terms, a recent reading. Most 1990s criticism placed the film alongside the historical-frontier window's other entries (Rob Roy, Mohicans, Legends of the Fall; see The Highlander Rob Roy and Last of the Mohicans Window) and read it through the period-epic lens. The framework's contention is that Braveheart is structurally distinct from the others — its post-midpoint approach is willed, its Climax tests the approach's own terms rather than the externally-posed contest, and its Wind-Down confirms the political project — and that the distinction is what produced the Best Picture vote.