"For the head in his hand he held it up straight,towards the fairest at the table he twisted the face,‘See thou get ready, Gawain, to go as thou vowedst,and as faithfully seek till thou find me, good sir,as thou hast promised in this place in the presence of these knights.To the Green Chapel go thou, and get thee, I charge thee,such a dint as thou hast dealt - indeed thou hast earneda nimble knock in return on New Year’s morning!’With a rude roar and rush his reins he turned then,and hastened out through the hall-door with his head in his hand,and fire of the flint flew from the feet of his charger."
-Anonymous, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,from the translation by J.R.R. Tolkien
By the light of a fire in a room of a small castle, the young Gawain (Dev Patel), nearing the end of his quest to face the mysterious Green Knight, is asked by his host (Joel Edgerton), “what do you hope to gain from facing all this?” “Honour,” he answers unassured. “That is why a knight does what he does.” “And this is all it takes?” the Lord questions. “You do this one thing, you return home a changed man, an honourable man -just like that?” “Yes”, says Gawain with even less certainty.
David Lowery’s The Green Knight, a filmed adaptation of the chivalric romance of Sir Gawain (anonymously written sometime in the fourteenth century) deals a lot with the subject of honour. It is what sets the title character on his quest, after dishonourably beheading the defenseless Green Knight (Ralph Ineson) on Christmas Day upon agreeing to a “game” wherein he must receive an equal blow from the knight in a years’ time. Armed with the knights’ axe that he had won and must now return, he is bound to fulfil his bargain, seeking to restore his honour and be made the hero he aspires to. But he doesn’t quite understand all that entails, that to achieve these things requires more than just doing his duty -it necessitates a spirit he simply doesn’t have.
The Green Knight may well be the most authentic Arthurian movie ever made -and for that it’s likely to alienate many casual viewers. This is probably as close a cinematic translation as we’ve ever gotten of one of those old medieval epic poem cycles, in which the Arthurian mythology is rooted. It’s paced much like one of those texts, is marginally episodic, and is very decidedly non-literal, abstract by design. Lowery keeps the film dreamlike and mystifying, refuses to acquiesce to heavy lore. A lot of finer details are left vague but for some context clues -nobody else in the Camelot court is named for instance, not even King Arthur (Sean Harris) -but we know he is Arthur because he is the king. His world is however completely irrelevant to the tale at hand so it doesn’t need deeper establishing -the movie presumes we’re at least partly aware of the basics of Arthurian legend.
It works just as much if you aren’t though too, because it’s not a movie that is very much about specifics. The Green Knight is a plain hero’s journey told in a radical way and with a radical bent that deconstructs the very archetype. It hits all the beats but plays them with new notes, starting with the identity and motive of the hero himself. At no point in the story does Gawain really know what he’s doing. His journey is a consequence of his mistake and he performs it out of obligation, out of a knightly code of honour that must be upheld. He has not taken his year to come to terms with his mortality. He’s not very spirited or steadfast or intelligent or even that noble, and he’s certainly not brave. He wears the dignity of the knight he aspires to be and faces his obstacles bold-faced, but underneath the surface he is clearly deathly afraid. Patel is excellently cast and gives one of the finest performances of his career as he plays a man desperately trying to mould himself into an ideal, but not being cut out for it. He has no idea why he has the ambitions that he has, he only does –but the more he tries to convince himself of his heroism, the less it comes across. There’s a sense of entitlement driving him too, a masculine surety of his place of power in the world that is ingrained into the fabric of his personal ideal, and a need to maintain and assert that. In this regard too though he falls short, and in a sharply humiliating way. Essentially, it all comes down to Gawain taking the hero’s journey in the expectation of reaping its’ rewards as long as he acts the part of the noble and honourable knight. He believes his growth and heroism will be thrust upon him, that it’ll be easy, and that somehow he will survive (he’s terrified of dying). Yet never is he made to challenge that conviction until the conversation I quoted earlier –once again needing to be confronted by it externally, his only chosen pathway to change.
This arc is wrapped up also in a lot of the movies’ symbolism, and especially in the significance of a green girdle, gifted to him by his mother (Sarita Choudhury) which she claims will protect him from all harm as long as he wears it. It’s unclear whether there’s any real magic in it, but Gawain believes there is, or at least is not willing to chance it. It’s meaning becomes fundamental to the film and is one of several metaphors employed over the course of his quest. Each figure, each place, and each obstacle is more than just what’s there on the surface, as is common of a lot of these old stories. Lowery gives them a slight air of suspicion through haunting tonal cues that pervade much of the movie, stylized techniques designed to enhance its’ dreamy quality (each scene transition is beautifully intoxicating), and amplified by a glorious and foreboding score by Daniel Hart, consisting heavily of Latin choruses and string music that might be authentic to the period and which I love a lot in part due to how much it reminds me of the “Voices of Light” soundtrack to The Passion of Joan of Arc. Nevertheless it sets a mood of slight unease, encourages you to think deeper about the significance of each episode along Gawain’s route to the enigmatic Green Chapel. And it plays in the realm of the surreal frequently, illustrating the kind of sensations that vibe with the text its’ based on but cannot be completely articulated through that text alone. It all stands to quell explicit judgement and to provoke. What is it Gawain is actually facing? Who is Gawain and what is his world? And as in any good myth, its’ answers are as pertinent now as they’ve ever been.
Patel is the star of the show and brilliant all the way through at capturing exactly what this character needs and enriching the film exponentially. It’s the proof he’s one of our burgeoning great actors, but he’s supported by a strong cast as well, not least of which is Alicia Vikander. She is his love interest and the shades with which she plays it are beguiling and intense. Without giving much away it’s something of a dual role that gives her licence to explore opposite personas that aren’t mutually exclusive. A little of one is in the other and vice versa. And I forgot how powerful a presence Vikander can be in a movie. Perhaps overlooked too in the discussion (given the make-up he’s behind) is Ralph Ineson, an unconventional choice for the title character given his low profile, but he is absolutely the right person for it. Ineson lends such a sense of both weight and jocularity to this characters’ attitude towards his game, his voice conveying both a depth of wisdom and a brazenly laddish taste for impropriety. He’s steadily been becoming one of the more engaging character actors out there since The Witch -and this movie actually reunites him, if only for a scene, with Kate Dickie from that movie.
The look of the character is quite exciting too, a figure made of green wood with marvelously sharp features. There’s a lot of creativity in design all over this movie, which is certainly the best looking of the year. Andrew Droz Palermo’s work is electrifying, his colour saturation astounding in its’ boldness and tantalizing richness, and his cinematography so precise and magnetic. There’s one long take that simply follows Gawain on his horse, gradually revealing the scope of the world as it does. And he and Lowery have an eye for exquisite frames, no doubt influenced by the intricacies of medieval art -so many gorgeous shots of just Gawain standing in doorways for example. There’s typically an inherent darkness to the medieval aesthetic, a dim gray that hangs over that world (and is not entirely historically accurate); while Lowery replicates that to some extent in Camelot, once out of the city he delights in letting more vibrant colour seep in until Gawain arrives at the Green Chapel itself -the brightest of all the movies’ set pieces. This breathtaking visual identity comes through in the costume design too, Malgosia Turzanska expertly dressing Patel in a vivid orange cloak that can’t help but catch the eye. That big halo of a crown is pretty striking as well.
The Green Knight has perhaps the greatest movie ending in a while, one that’s likely to be a bit contentious, but is so intellectually captivating, and it reminds me of that of a favourite Scorsese movie to boot. In my audience the reaction was a bit tough to gauge, certainly there were some unsatisfied once the movie was over -which is fair, it’s not the fantasy adventure it might have been anticipated as. Even I wasn’t prepared for just how challenging it was. But I love that it was a summer movie that dared to be so (though in actuality it’s a Christmas movie). The Green Knight is an absorbing film, layered and complex, but subtly thrilling and enticingly strange as well. And it’s sure to drive more people towards Arthurian lore. In that regard, The Green Knight is aptly poetic, it is mythology made film, the magic of ancient literature translated by the magic of cinematic language. Evocative and stimulating and transcendent. By all expectations, the movie of the year.
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