Betrayal in “Braveheart”

We all want to be like William Wallace. The dashing hero, Wallace fights against injustice. He is the ultimate good guy, strong and sensitive. Robert the Bruce, however, is a different guy. A promising leader, he is a possible heir to the Scottish throne if Scotland gains independence from England. His political maneuvering gets him in trouble, as he chooses to betray Wallace in hopes to gain the throne by politically appeasing King Edward I, who is king of England and fighting to keep control of Scotland. Not the good guy or bad guy, Bruce is somewhere in between.

The dichotomy of these two characters is interesting. Wallace makes perfect ethical decisions; he’s someone we can root for easily. Bruce is someone we wish would have stuck his commitment to Wallace and not betrayed him. It’s easy to moralize Bruce’s actions, to look down on him. Truly, what he did was reprehensible. However, there’s a part of Bruce in all of us. The part that says to compromise in the face of adversity, that it’s better to high tail it out of a sticky situation to fight another day instead of standing firm for our convictions. These decisions can result in negatively affecting those around us, as it does in the film in the case of Wallace’s capture and subsequent grisly execution. We wish we were Wallace all the time, but there are times that we are Bruce.

Bruce does redeem himself. In the film, he ends up leading battles that overthrew English rule. He takes his mistake and learns his lesson- that he will never again betray those who fight for the independence of Scotland. It was a costly lesson, a lesson that almost cost Scotland its freedom, but it’s a good thing that Bruce comes around in the end. The film is highly historically inaccurate as Bruce never betrayed Wallace in real life, but the themes of betrayal and redemption in the film are worth examination.