Plot
Robert Roy MacGregor (Liam Neeson) is a cattle drover and the leader of a clan in 18th century Scotland. He seeks and receives a loan of £1000 from the Marquis of Montrose (John Hurt). One of the Marquis's henchmen, Archibald Cunningham (Tim Roth), learns about the loan from Montrose's factor, Killearn (Brian Cox). Cunningham kills MacGregor's best friend MacDonald (Eric Stoltz) and steals the money.
Unable to pay his loan, MacGregor is forced to become an outlaw when he refuses to bear false witness for Montrose against the Duke of Argyll (Andrew Keir). He is hunted by Cunningham, who rapes MacGregor's wife Mary (Jessica Lange) to provoke him. Cunningham ultimately captures MacGregor after killing his brother. However when Cunningham presents him to Montrose, MacGregor escapes. Meanwhile, Mary tells the Duke of Argyll that MacGregor fled Montrose because of his refusal to bear false witness against him. Meanwhile, Macgregor persuades Argyll to propose to Montrose a duel between him and Cunningham, leading to a climactic sword duel to the death.
Read more about this topic: Rob Roy (film)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)