Mark Reviews Movies: THE GREEN KNIGHT

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 29, 2021

The overwhelming sensation of The Green Knight is of witnessing something of a paradox. Writer/director David Lowery's film concerns itself with, exists within, and communicates ideas, values, ideals, and even storytelling that are of much older age—one that, if it even existed in its traditionally romanticized form in the first place, has been mostly forgotten. This makes sense, obviously, since Lowery is adapting the classic—and also forgotten, save in the academic spheres of literature and mythology—"chivalric romance" Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, written by an anonymous—and, hence, further forgotten—author in the 14th century.

As for that paradox, the film's intentionally meandering narrative, elliptical and puzzling and concerned in almost every moment with communicating some—sometimes ambiguous and sometimes blatant—moral lesson, is so old-fashioned that it now feels novel—unique and new, staggering and startling, frustrating but enigmatically and consistently engaging. The story has a singular point: communicating the journey and adventures of a young, inexperienced, and aspiring knight, through perils and trials of the world, humanity, and supernatural events/entities. Along the way, the knight reveals his strengths and shortcomings, and at the end of the quest, he will finally reveal of what stuff he is truly made.

Such stories, of course, are now and have long since been routine. The formula is beyond cliché, serving as the core narrative for centuries of literature and more than a century of movies, and has become something foundational. This journey of the lone hero has existed in the tales of every culture throughout most of recorded human history, so Lowery's adaptation shouldn't seem so special.

It is, though, in ways that are difficult to describe but that are consistently felt. Lowery has taken this story of Arthurian heroism and chivalry, expanded its plot (a necessity, since the original poem only contains three scenes), altered its key lesson (originally about a guest's manners but much weightier here), and focused on the idea of storytelling as a series of episodes—of challenges to overcome, of lessons to be learned, of wonders to be witnessed, of terrors to endure, of existential horror to either succumb to or conquer.

To attempt to find some specific meaning in each of these episodes is, perhaps, to miss the point, although the temptation is great. That appeal to search for and try to deduce meaning is certainly evidence of how well Lowery stages and visualizes the whole of the film. It is, equal to or above anything else in the film, a feast of vision and style, right from its opening shot.

In it, a whispered narration tells us of the great British king of legend, who pulled a sword from a stone. A figure sits upon a throne, as a round crown lowers upon the man's head. This tale, though, does not belong to that king, the narrator continues, but to another legend. He is Gawain (Dev Patel), the youngest of the knights of the Round Table and the legendary king's nephew. When the crown reaches him, his entire head bursts into flames.

This is decidedly Gawain's tale, to such a degree that almost every other character—even the ones whose legends have endured for centuries—remains unnamed. We know the King (Sean Harris) is Arthur, just as we know the Queen (Kate Dickie) is Guinevere. The magician (Emmet O'Brien), whom we know to be a wizard from an eerie red glow as he looks for danger, must be Merlin, just as Gawain's mother (Sarita Choudhury), whose own magic summons the eponymous visitor to Camelot, has to be Morgan le Fey.

Lowery, though, doesn't want any of the history, stories, and drama of the court to get in the way of this tale, so it all comes down to the Green Knight (Ralph Ineson), his skin like bark, arriving at the King's court on Christmas Day. He has a game to play. Whoever strikes him will obtain his axe, but in a year's time, the striker will receive a matching blow.

Gawain, eager to finally have a story to tell that doesn't involve drinking or his non-committal romance with Essel (Alicia Vikander), volunteers. He beheads the visitor and earns his reward. The Green Knight, though, rises, grabs his head, and, holding his severed and laughing head, rides off to the Green Chapel to await his promise to strike Gawain.

A year later, Gawain embarks to meet his fate. The rest of the story has the knight traveling toward the Green Chapel, facing scoundrels and a ghost and giants and a mysterious fox and the Lord (Joel Edgerton) of a great manor, who makes his own deal about exchanging what each of them earns during the knight's stay (Vikander also plays the tempting lady of that house).

Each of these challenges (introduced with chapter titles) offers a test of Gawain's wisdom, honor, virtue, bravery, and some other ideals on which those Arthurian legends so prided themselves. His failures, such as asking the ghost of a murdered woman (played by Erin Kellyman) for something in return for finding her lost head or flinching when a giant reaches to grab him, tell us as much about what he isn't—but could and, by his own belief, should be—as who he is.

It's that simple, and so, in theory, is Lowery's approach to the telling of this tale. Its relaxed pace, though, belies and complements the richness of these images (Andrew Droz Palermo provides the chameleonic but stylistically consistent cinematography), from the dreadful and dreary (Gawain's exit under clouds with the castle rising in the backdrop, a battlefield full of corpses with no one left to bury them, and a nighttime visit to a stream to retrieve a severed head) to the subtly or wholly fantastical (scenes drenched in certain colors or a march of giants, for example).

Make no mistake, the film is bizarre in an assortment of ways (Its double anti-climax, a stunningly voiceless montage of what could be and an ultimate punch line, stands out), but Lowery embraces that, just as he adopts the mood, mentality, and moral compass of this tale. The Green Knight feels like an anachronistic oddity—a film from and of another time and another world. It's difficult to completely gauge what it is, but whatever that may be, it's something special.

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