Katy loved Braveheart. I mean, she deeply loved this film.
Like a lot of Gen Xers, my wife Katy worked two jobs in her twenties. One of them was as a video rental clerk. She saw Braveheart in theaters three times, and when it landed on the in store rotation, she was the only employee who did not groan.
She owned it on VHS. Then DVD. Then Blu ray. Then 4K. Then streaming.
This was prime comfort movie territory for her.
She watched it on infusion days. One afternoon, when I went back to pick her up, I walked into the treatment room and found two nurses crowded around her phone, watching the movie with her.
She also loved a sappy underdog story.
Sorry to the die hard Braveheart fans, but when you strip away the gore and the epically framed kilts, that is exactly what it is. An underdog story, with a sweeping romance layered in, very much in line with how Hollywood packaged these films in the 1990s.
Katy would never quite admit this, even when I gently pointed out her suspiciously consistent enjoyment of heist movies.
Ocean’s Eleven (2001)
The Italian Job (2003)
The Usual Suspects (1995)
We can argue about whether those qualify as underdog stories, but the pattern is hard to miss.
I honestly cannot tell you the last time I watched Braveheart when Katy was still here. It had become such a constant in our lives that it did not feel like something you watched. It was just there. What I do know is that it has hovered at the edges of my days ever since she died. Her love of that film tugged at me every time it popped up on a menu, every time I caught a piece of James Horner’s score. Even a dumb parody was enough to wake something I usually keep dormant.
When she died, it went straight onto the no watch list. We will talk more about that list another time.
Grief has a way of making ordinary things heavier than you expect.
Even after I quieted the inner resistance enough to decide to watch it, I still had to follow through. That took a few more days before I was ready.
From the opening camera sweep across the Scottish landscape, paired with Horner’s score, I felt myself slipping into the nostalgia blanket. Warm. Familiar. Comfortable.
The first thing I noticed was that I kept turning away from the violence.
This was not entirely new. A few nights earlier, watching Dr. No with my father, I found myself looking away from the karate chops and the bright red paint pools Bond leaves behind as he shoots his way through Spectre agents.
That surprised me. I would not have flinched at this once. I have watched all three Human Centipede movies. By any reasonable metric, Braveheart should register as a Garry Marshall rom com at this point.
But after walking through Katy’s cancer, even stylized, fake violence has started to unsettle me. Not because it feels real, just because something in me has shifted.
I did not finish the movie. I stopped when they caught Wallace. I could feel that continuing was not going to add anything. I will come back to this another time. There is clearly a different post waiting to be written about my sudden lack of patience for Hollywood brutality.
Watching Braveheart again also meant memories. Lots of them.
It was often playing while Katy did crosswords, puzzles, or napped. During one of those half watching, half sleeping chemo days, I was sitting next to her when she suddenly said,
“Do you think villages had horseshoe baths?”
“What?”
“Horseshoe baths. Every village needs a horseshoe bath.”
Then it clicked. Braveheart was her nap movie that day, and we were at the early revenge scene, the one where the camera lingers on a horse’s hooves trudging through village muck.
“Horseshoe baths” was an inside joke from a much earlier viewing. In her version of time travel, she planned to go back and install them in every village.
She came up with this before the chemo friends.
Even then, half asleep from exhaustion and dulled by treatment, she heard the movie clearly enough to spark a conversation. That is how deeply this film lived in her.
Did I enjoy it?
I suppose that is the natural question.
I will say this. I do not think I will be watching it again.
It is a very 1990s movie. It keeps returning to the same emotional notes, assuming that if you stay there long enough, the feeling will land. That does not mean I did not enjoy it. It is just not an experience I feel compelled to repeat.
It is not about loyalty or betrayal. Watching it now does not feel like I am breaking some unspoken promise to her.
It did not reduce me to tears the way I expected.
I just do not feel the pull anymore.
Without Katy, the reason has changed. What once mattered because she loved it now lands as just an okay movie.
That is what changes on the rewatch.
Rewatch / Replay 
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