Bordering on the revisionist

Liam Neeson in a kilt. Jessica Lange with a Scottish accent. A director more at home on the range than in the Highlands. So how come Rob Roy is so good? By Adam Mars-Jones

Rob Roy is a story of revisionist adventure, rather along the lines of the recent Last of the Mohicans, in which red-blooded action is married to a certain ripeness of mind. Screenwriter Alan Sharp, who has written a number of Westerns in the past (Ulzana's Raid and The Hired Hand among them), tells a story of honour and betrayal, rustling and land- grabbing, just as well suited to the Highlands of his native Scotland, and to a rather idealised historical period, the early 18th century.

Robert Roy MacGregor was a real person (1671-1734), but unlikely to have been quite the New Man incarnated by Liam Neeson, checking tenderly on his sleeping bairns, and keeping clean with regular dips in a handy loch. The clan ethic in Rob Roy is presented as essentially democratic, despite Rob's leadership: important decisions are taken communally, and women aren't excluded from the process. Rob Roy is full of care for his extended family (coughing children, infirm old folk), and has a relationship of passionate equality with his wife Mary (Jessica Lange).

The contrast with the aristocracy - there is no middle class - would be hilarious if the individual roles were any less well written. As a rule of thumb, anyone who wears a wig is scheming, materialistic and vile to women. You might think that aristocrats would have some care for heirs, but we don't see any sort of family structure (the only visible women are servants). While the peasantry is noble and even unworldly, the upper class is brutal and foppish, alternating in the case of John Hurt's Marquess of Montrose between the distortedly masculine world of gambling and politicking and a distortedly feminine one of sipping tea in blue tents and planning formal gardens. Tim Roth comes up with his best performance in years, both funny and alarming, as Archibald Cunningham, who exceeds his patron Montrose as much in foppishness as in brutality. Cunningham describes himself as "a bastard abroad", and his sword is for hire to anyone willing and able to foot his bill at the tailors.

Alan Sharp is fairer in his distribution of wit between the classes than he is with virtue, but the result is still somewhat disconcerting, with a planned knees-up being as likely to produce word play and bon mots - notably a sophisticated joke about sex and Calvinism - as a nobleman's drawing-room. In Sharp's vision of the past, the Highlands were a virtual salon of rugged repartee, and the very sheep bleated epigrams.

The director, Michael Caton-Jones - also a Scot, though an expatriate - makes the most of his Highland locations. Every dawn is greeted with orchestral rapture by Carter Burwell's score, but not everything is so picture postcard in sensibility. We dread and despise Montrose's private army, but don't their red uniforms stand out beautifully against the grey of a misty loch? Doesn't orange look well against the landscape of soft greens and browns, even if it is the orange of a burning cottage?

Caton-Jones's film language is relatively straightforward. His fanciest touch is to cross-cut two scenes, for instance a clan's celebration and an ambush in the woods which will turn the joy into sorrow. Here the emotions are strongly contrasted, but immediately afterwards Caton-Jones makes the counterpoint more melancholy by editing together a clanswoman's sung lament with a dying man's stumblings in the wood, as he tries to hide clan money that has been entrusted to him.

This mannerism of structure would become irritating if it was over-used, but the director isn't above heartfelt plainness: the film ends with precisely the sort of incredulous reunion - people running towards each other from a distance, no less - that has been made unavailable to sincerity by parody after parody.

Rob Roy would only be an enjoyable entertainment, boasting a fine cast and some unusually convincing sword fights, if it didn't develop the theme of male and female honour in a way that almost unbalances it. It's not that Rob Roy's personal code is unthinking: at one point he refuses a challenge to a fight by seeming to agree to it, establishing "first cut" as the terms of the contest, then running his hand lightly across his opponent's blade. "Well done," he says, with irony but without the desire to humiliate. Even his No is noble.

But early in the film our hero treats his sons to a lecture on honour - a gift a man gives himself - which Mary listens to with apparent approval. It's as if she doesn't notice that his definitions make honour a metaphysical thing for a man and a physical one for a woman - her sexual integrity. The film's plot, as it unfolds, shows up Rob Roy's lecture as more than a little smug.

When Mary is raped, she chooses not to tell her husband. The whole point of the assault on her was to provoke Rob to recklessness in revenge, and she refuses to be used in this way. She rejects a code of honour based on her body, even though she must also reject her husband's version of it, by keeping from him a crucial event in her life. No doubt these internal dramas are profoundly anachronistic as regards the 18th century, but almost everything we enjoy on the screen is anachronistic. What is interesting is what happens to the hero of an action film when women decline to be fought over.

What happens is that for a considerable stretch of screen time - getting on for an hour - Rob Roy's notion of bravery seems naive and even shallow. His emotions aren't fully engaged, as compared to his wife's, and unwilling as he is to make alliances or even to call in favours, he fails to develop any sort of politics.

Jessica Lange makes a fine job of her character's trauma and transcendence of it, and must be forgiven for the uncertainty of her accent. There's a fine moment when she pins up her hair in the immediate aftermath of the assault, though the turfed roof is ablaze above her. When she does leave her burning cottage one witness later remembers her as noble, queenly, but that is not how she looks at the time. She looks like a sleepwalker.

Towards the end of the film, husband and wife come together again in knowledge and forgiveness in a way that is actually a bit hard to take. They have a dialogue so healing that a couple counsellor would applaud and congratulate them on the work done and the progress made. But Rob Roy's handling of its theme of honour is rich enough to excuse the occasional wallow.

n On release from Friday