Brave stars a new heroine – A princess, but there the resemblance to the Disney princesses of old ends. She’s a redhead who can shoot arrows, climb mountains, who can’t stay still in court, and for once, just once, has no interest in being with anyone. That can come later; right now there’s adventure to be had!
Merida is a Scottish princess, the daughter of King Fergus and Queen Elinor of Clan Dunbroch. The movie begins with her family’s near-fatal encounter with the legendary and immortal Mor’du, a massive and demonic bear who rips off King Fergus’s leg.
Fast forward, and Merida is a beautiful and rebellious young woman, and the time has come for her to marry a prince from one of the thee neighbouring clans. It’s something for which she has been preparing her whole life, and her mother has been educating her in all the ways a demure Princess should behave.
The princes have to compete for her affections in a contest of her choosing. She chooses archery. After the three princes have had their go, she appears, bow in hand, her ruby-red hair unleashed from her royal wimple, and beats them. After a terrible argument with her superbly proper mother, she runs away into the forest. There she meets a witch.
SPOILER WARNING!
Merida buys a spell from the witch – a spell to change her mother so that her impending arranged betrothal will be cancelled. The witch gives her a cake the Queen is to eat. Merida comes home, makes her mother eat the cake, and….
Her mother changes into a bear.
Her mother is now an animal: mute, powerless. Her Queenly aspect and her practiced and proper femininity she wished to transfer to her daughter are gone.
Distraught, Merida spirits the bear away to the forest and teaches her how to hunt, to fish. In her mother’s animal state, in which her identity is missing, she cannot speak, and she has to depend upon her daughter, they find a new warmth in their relationship.
All is well until her mother turns to her and is suddenly unable to recognize Merida. For a few moments, her mind flees and all that is left is the animal. Desperate, Merida realizes that she must quickly find a way to turn her mother back.
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My mother-in-law has always been an absent-minded woman. But a few years ago she began, at only sixty-six years old, to forget things. My wife and her two sisters discussed it and made an unspoken agreement not to think about it – dementia does not happen to someone that young.
But it got worse. Stress exacerbated things – when faced with a prolonged visit by her own mother-in-law, a tremendously formidable ninety-eight year-old, she forgot the same thing three or four times in as little time as ten minutes. She lost cars in parking lots. She aged quickly.
Finally, her daughters admitted something was wrong, and she went to the Memory Clinic. The diagnosis – mild cognitive decline. It was true. She is now sliding still further, but she is now relaxed and accepting of the whole thing. Now, at only seventy, she cannot remember colours of clothes, or much of her children’s childhood (although she has perfect recollection of her own). A few months ago, while we were preparing to travel to London and Paris, she became convinced we were staying for a year, in the apartment she herself had lived in during my father in-law’s sabbatical twenty-five years ago. Much of memory loss has so much to do with physical objects and their position in the time stream.
At some point, we’re going to visit her and she will not recognize us. She’ll turn to us and we’ll be strangers. But there will be no witch’s spell to turn her back.
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Brave has – almost accidentally, I suspect – touched upon the tragedy of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia, specifically in how it affects mothers and daughters. Mothers are so often the care-givers, the record-keepers. They maintain the family connections. They are the role-models for young women, and daughters count on mothers to be there, to be the parent who lives the longest, and to be the teacher of right things.
But dementia takes all those useful things away, and reverses the caregiving role. The authority and wisdom a mother possesses is gone. Most importantly, I have noticed that dementia robs you of your voice, your intentions. People with dementia become unsure of what they say, because they’re afraid they’ll see that look – a look that is half-sad and half-frustrated, that means your child is being forced to admit there is a problem. The afflicted spend most of their efforts faking it until they can’t remember that they need to fake it. I think that it’s possible that the writer and director might be touching upon her own experiences with an aging loved one.
Merida’s journey is in part about how children usually grow away from parents, and also how parents sometimes float away from children. Merida has to put her own rebellion away to rescue her mother, and almost fails. The final scene, in which there are no heroes, no great love stories, is simply an expression of grief and longing as the films most important relationship teeters on the brink.
