Over-indulgently heralded in its opening titles as "A Cinematic Adaptation of the Chivalric Romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by Anonymous," writer-director David Lowery's latest film sees Sir Gawain of Arthurian legend portrayed by Dev Patel as a brash and intemperate youth to whom we are introduced in a brothel, cavorting with an unnamed prostitute played by Alicia Vikander. This, in stark contrast to the guileless exemplar of courtly virtue presented in the 14-century poem on which the movie is based.
Our story begins on Christmas Day. Attending a celebratory feast at the Round Table, Gawain is summoned to the side of his aunt and uncle, Queen Guinevere (Kate Dickie) and King Arthur (Sean Harris), who kindly chastise him for having no tales to tell of his own adventures, what with medieval courts being quite obsessed with tales of adventure, tests of mettle and virtue, quests for honor and all that. Opportunistically, Gawain's mother (Sarita Choudhury) - who may be the witch Morgan Le Fay - meets with a coven of courtly ladies and, unbeknownst to anyone else, summons the Green Knight, an imposing brute with skin like tree bark and a crown of leaves bestride a dark green horse to match. The Green Knight challenges Arthur's knights to a game, to see if any one of them can land a blow on him. The catch is that, should they succeed, in exactly one year's time, that same knight must ride forth six nights to the Green Chapel where the Green Knight dwells, and allow him to return a blow to match. The haughty Gawain accepts the challenge. Although disturbed to see the Green Knight lay down his axe and kneel, as if presenting himself to be executed, Gawain hastily takes his foe's head. Of course, this proves to have been an imprudent decision indeed, as the Green Knight simply gets up, takes his head, and rides back home.
Bound by a code of honor that seems to eclipse all reason, and pressed on by his ailing uncle, Gawain does indeed ride for the Green Chapel to make his appointment with his foe. Along the way, he dallies in further misadventures that Lowery exploits as opportunities to further deconstruct what, from a postmodern perspective, are the disturbingly fatalistic underpinnings of classic romance.
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Ill-tidings for The Green Knight are as imminent as its opening titles. Right out of the gate, Lowery opts for one of his generation of indie filmmakers' most annoying pretensions by dividing his film into episodic chapters, implying a literary aspiration that is even less credible than its cinematic aspirations. But rarely does a film of this kind - the latest release by A24, the premier producer and distributor of middlebrow arthouse-genre trash fusion - so effortlessly distill the primary, ego-stroking value of structuring a movie in this way. Unbridled from a more classically-molded producer's reigns on auteur-ish excess, Lowery and his contemporaries give themselves an excuse to be flabby with their storytelling. The episodic structure of The Green Knight ostensibly mimics the freewheeling, allegorical connotations of the medieval literature from which it takes inspiration, but it still falls into the same paradigm as any number of chaptered films. In the place of enchantment inspired by a very deeply felt, animistic sense of the world around classical authors, Lowery can only offer overly self-conscious symbolism from a jaded, contemporary perspective. And in stylized terms, the place of didactic simplicity is assumed by obscurantism.
Take, for example, Gawain's early encounter with a band of thieves led by Barry Keoghan. Encountering the thief on a battlefield as he scavenges among the mud and corpses, the young Gawain is too hasty to accept the advice of a vulgar commoner, who tells him that by following the river he will find a short cut to the Green Chapel. What's more, the thief is offended when, in exchange for this advice, Gawain can only be plied for a single piece of silver. With the help of some compatriots, the thief has Gawain tied up, takes the green sash that his mother gave him as an enchanted protection, steals the axe of the Green Knight that Gawain has brought with him, and rides off on Gawain's horse, promising to complete his quest for him. That's what one gets for taking short cuts. And talking to strangers. And trusting poor people, I guess.
I suppose one could read this as an effective distillation and deconstruction of the kind of parable one finds in medieval romances. But as far as I'm concerned this is just modern, bourgeois neuroses, the period equivalent of privileged people masochistically fantasizing about getting mugged in an alleyway. I'm also tickled by how much the episode parallels, and is preemptively parodied by, the anarcho-syndicalist sketch from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Already too lost in this tangent, let's just lay out what comes of this ordeal. If you're expecting some late act encounter with Keoghan's thief, you'll be sorely disappointed. In another episode in which Gawain finds himself in a haunted house, he simply finds the Green Knight's axe. Some time later, he simply recovers the green sash from a woman attempting to seduce him.
This is the essence of cinematic obscurantism, in which the filmmaker asks the imagined spectator a series of content-focused questions that go absolutely nowhere. How did the axe and sash come to be where they are? Did Keoghan's thief attempt to complete Gawain's quest and fail? Are these actually the same axe and sash? Is this all just part of the enchantment cast by Gawain's mother? The most pressing and burgeoning question, however, is, Why the hell should we care?
This type of convoluted storytelling is part-and-parcel of how contemporary filmmakers working in the middlebrow niche somewhere between arthouse affectation and puerile, derivative genre movies launder lazy writing. In the absence of a coherent through-line between events, Lowery panders to a certain spectator's willingness to "read" the sequence as purely symbolic. But this kind of reading tellingly abrogates the demand that filmmakers working within evidently conventional genres - in this case, the fantasy adventure - present the reader with a compelling story. On the one hand, a pre-climactic encounter with the thief may seem a bit obvious. But it at least establishes a sense of conflict, a friction that pulls the spectator into the narrative. And that's the bare rub: There is no discernible conflict at the heart of The Green Knight, no friction that is waring away at Gawain as a protagonist outside of vaguely alluded doubts and compulsions.
The obvious rebuttal to this is that Lowery is deliberately establishing a formulaic basis for physical conflict in order to disappoint our expectations. Through stylized cinematography and editing, as well as Wizard of Oz-style casting in which actors portray more than one character, The Green Knight holds the spectator at a distance, presenting itself as a more ephemeral experience, Gawain's quest painting a progressively dispiriting psychological portrait of a man who gladly faces senseless death in the pursuit of finite honor. The hollowness of the story, the evident emptiness of what it depicts, is the entire point. Perhaps the codes of classical chivalry - buttressed by a fantasist conception of the morality of the noble classes, steeped in a pathological Christian fear of sin as embodied by the feminine, the homosexual, the pagan, and ultimately Nature itself - when stripped bare, reveal a kind of cult of death worship. And perhaps these foundational myths in European culture, ostensibly modeling virtue and heroism, portend allegorical significance for our own modern worship of death.
But there's only so far that we can pursue this kind of reading of The Green Knight before we just end up in a contorted justification for a boring movie's existence. Even with the frictionless narrative taken for granted as allegorical, the allegory and the motivation behind it fall completely flat. To what should we attach the image of the Green Knight, then; this Other who bows himself to be beheaded, supplicant to the charade of chivalry? To what do we owe the queer, clandestine partnership between Gawain's mother and King Arthur, both pushing Gawain onward to embrace death? The problem is, again, one of the total absence of friction, the absence of conflict. Allegory itself thrives on conflict, on contradictions that may, in the cinematic form, be heightened by a sensual combination of visual and aural illusion. Allegory without conflict is not allegory, it's just superficial content.
There's a world of difference between Lowery's exercise in "deconstruction" here and, say, the revisionist samurai and period films that came out of Japan in the 1960's. Filmmakers like Masaki Kobayashi, Kaneto Shindo, and Kihachi Okamoto could interrogate the lies of romantic histories, deconstruct their foundations on hypocrisy and violence, mediate the generational trauma and existential dread they reproduced, because of their deep and continuing pertinence in contemporary ideology. There was still a persistent conflict that made such allegories vital. Lowery's stripping bare of chivalric romance, on the other hand, is no more allegorically pertinent to North American or even Euro-centric cinema than are right wing nationalist claims to "Western civilization" actually premised in any kind of authentic cultural or historical continuity. This is pointed up by the fact that, in order to gesture at allegorical relevancy, Lowery needs to necessarily run roughshod over what the poem of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is actually about.
Nearing the climax of The Green Knight, we find the exhausted Gawain accepting the hospitality of a Lord played by Joel Edgerton. A repetition of the encounter with Keoghan's thief, the Lord assures Gawain that the Green Chapel is less than a day's ride from his castle, and that until the appointed day he can rest his bones in luxury as an honored guest. The Lord's wife, also portrayed by Alicia Vikander, attempts to seduce Gawain while her husband is away. Though frothing with Christian terror, the entire episode proves to be astoundingly anti-erotic, even when Gawain's farewell to his male host is capped off with a very intimate kiss on the lips, suggesting that what Gawain mistook for the mischievous wife's seduction was but the fulcrum for an exchanging of gifts between the two men.
This episode is directly inspired by one in the original poem, except that in the poem it is not merely an episode. It is, indeed, the foundation of the narrative. The thing is that the parable offered in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight does not really have anything to do with the battle with the Green Knight. The obsession with honor is not rooted in proving one's mettle in bloodsport, but rather in the less sexy aspect of chivalric honor that emphasized honesty between noblemen. Having agreed to give his host whatever he has "won" while resting in his home in exchange for whatever the Lord wins hunting in the woods, Gawain is only resilient against the Lady's advances to the extent of mollifying her with kisses, which he then gives to the Lord without telling him how he "won" them. The green sash of the poem is actually the final gift from the Lady, which Gawain ultimately keeps secret from the Lord, too afraid and ashamed to reveal what he and his wife have been doing behind his back. By the end of the story, the entire ordeal is revealed to be a trick played by Morgan le Fay to test the honor of Arthur's knights. By concealing the gift of the sash, Gawain has failed to live up to courtly standards, and thus must return to Camelot in shame. What's most telling, however, is that the story concludes with Gawain returning to Camelot and being accepted, like a Prodigal Son, with open arms. Indeed, the Knights of the Round Table take it upon themselves to all start wearing green sashes as a reminder of their camaraderie and shared human frailty to sin.
(The original poem is, of course, replete with Biblical allusions. Besides the testing of Gawain's virtue, his venture to the Green Chapel to face certain death at the Green Knight's hands is clearly patterned on both stories of Christian martyrdom as well as the test of Abraham's faith in offering his son Isaac as a sacrifice to God. Not much of The Green Knight is particularly attentive to a similar kind of allegorically specific religious imagery.)
In contrast to this tightly written, ingeniously deceptive narrative that combines high drama with humor, aspires to courtly virtue while teasing the vulgar and erotic, Lowery's Green Knight comes off as decidedly listless, unwieldy, and, most of all, neurotic. The dour, impressionistic world presented in the film is one filled with hypocrisy matched only by fanaticism. What is precluded is any notion of what the original poem presents as the foundational source of honor and virtue, which is the intimate bond formed between men through collective acknowledgment of their shared human weaknesses and, thus, the forgiveness of sin. The original parable is, of course, textured by a deep misogyny, as well as a pathological obsession with ensuring a clear delineation between homosocial bonds and the panic-inducing threat of homosexuality. (The whole story is basically qualified by the elaborate, 14-century equivalent of "no homo.") But these "problematic" elements of chivalric romance are, in their unalloyed historical context, at least evocative. Lowery's aversion to conflict - born out of an over-estimation of his ability to challenge generic and narrative conventions - means that his drama never even comes close to the same visceral energy, even when he literally traps his protagonist in a weird noble couple's sex game. It goes without saying that a 21st-century film adaptation of a 14th-century poem is going to say far more about the former period than the later. But it is still astounding how The Green Knight exudes, far more than its source, a pathological fear of getting "too close," even at the level that notions of devotion to a cause higher than oneself - whether that be to one's king, or one's kingdom, or one's God - are framed through a lens of psychological horror. Ostensibly deconstructing classical foundations of our conceptions of honor and heroism, The Green Knight instead skewers the navel-gazing hyper-individualism and alienation of our times, in which closeness and touch are manifested as sources of dread.
One does have to tip their hat to cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo, who previously worked with Lowery on A Ghost Story from 2017. He brings a sumptuous flare to what is otherwise a listless experience. The Green Knight desperately needs a consummate visual artist to facilitate the suggestion that there's more going on under the hood of Lowery's slouching fantasy than there actually is. Say what you will about the "real people" who informed and wrote the classics, that they were fanatics and hypocrites. They still quite evidently had the capacity for exacting both profound cruelty as well as great joy out of living. What's more, they also at least had a sense of humor. The tendency towards "deconstruction" that Lowery exercises here convolutes and obscures what is, in fact, already manifestly deconstructed in simply reading from the classics. The Green Knight offers, instead, a wholly new construction that is starkly unimaginative within its own cinematic context, Lowery doing what countless other middlebrow auteurs are doing, repeating techniques of structure and subversion that have been done to death, and in the mold of a genre that offers just enough points of superficial aesthetic interest. Spurring the film is not really a critical fascination with chivalric romance or the fantasy film genre, but, again, the puerile excitement of superficial content. In the design of certain scenes, and especially in the conception of the Green Knight itself, one perceives the major influence of Guillermo del Toro. Marred by Lowery's turgid screenplay, though, the effect is something like a Guillermo del Toro movie on Valium.
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