The Short Take:
THE GREEN KNIGHT is more an eerie, surrealist trip than a knight’s quest, at times plodding its way through existential dread. As someone who enjoys the source text, I did not appreciate the attempts to modernize the story. While the cinematography and production design are absolutely stunning, this one is only for those in the mood for an amusingly strange head-scratcher.
Image credit: The Atlantic
The Long Take:
I’m going to be up front: Games of Thrones this is not. In a lot of ways the trailer for David Lowery’s The Green Knight is misleading. Especially if you’re not familiar with the original story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, many viewers may assume this is an action adventure of epic proportions. But The Green Knight, while chronicling the quest of a hero, is completely devoid of sword-clanging, battle-crying, and heroic deeds. It’s just not that kind of movie.
And I wouldn’t want it to be. The original poem has an aura of mystery, and its premise is bizarre, especially for a 21st century reader. An other worldly green knight shows up at Arthur’s court and places a challenge to all the knights of the round table: anyone can strike him down, but the green knight must return the favor in a year’s time. The film does an arresting job of capturing a mood I would genuinely associate with this story. The soundtrack melds haunting medieval choir singing with dissonant orchestral arrangements and other aural oddities (I swear there are pan pipes at one point). The costumes and sets create a world completely their own, establishing that this is not a medieval period piece but a dark fantasy with exaggerated shapes and distortions in perspective. And there’s a soupy fog that pervades nearly every shot. Every shot is sumptuous and intoxicating, but also full of danger.
For me, Lowery goes just a little too far in this direction, though. Gawain’s quest isn’t fantastical so much as hallucinogenic. I found myself chuckling at certain moments, not because what I was watching was all that funny, but because I became increasingly baffled by what was happening as the film went on. There was a bit of fun in how weird this film is, but the pacing of scenes is so often slow (purposefully so, I imagine — it definitely sets a creepy tone). I appreciated what the film was doing at an intellectual level, but it was a little tough to sit through.
Why do this, I wondered? Why create this bad trip where we don’t really know what’s real or what’s happening when? What does that have to do with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight? The experience of watching this film brought me back to my undergraduate film class screenings and, later a graduate course I took on surrealism. Sometimes I’m in awe of what I’m seeing, and there’s a certain amount of delight in trying to make sense of the moving images, to glean any kind of meaning from them. But it’s not a fun, entertaining, or remotely comfortable experience. I appreciated the grotesqueness of the upper class or the ugliness of human frailty that Luis Buñuel’s Exterminating Angel creates when it gradually shows the degradation of a high society dinner party after the guests can no longer leave. But would I watch it again to kick back on a Saturday night? Nope. Lowery’s vision makes a lot more sense to me in the context of surrealist cinema because it has so many components: dream logic, non-sequiturs, doppelgängers, a critique of class privilege, sex, and death. (I won’t go into detail to avoid spoilers, but if you’ve already scene the film, let me know where you think any of these pop up.) The more I think about it, the more crossovers I can see between the 14th century send-up of Camelot (and no, I don’t mean Monty Python, though Castle Anthrax always makes me think of Lady Bertilak) and the core motifs of surrealist art.
And yet, this does not feel like the quest narrative I know and love. Lowery tries to modernize, with big sweeping changes for the Sir Gawain character in particular. So much so that I noticed the differences without even having refreshed my memory of the source text. And I was disappointed.
Rarely am I on the side of faithful adaptations. Scene-for-scene, line-for-line just does not translate from page to screen; a filmmaker has to figure out how to reshape and retell a narrative so that it makes for a good cinematic rather than textual experience. But going into this film, I was really excited to see such a classic tale of chivalry come to life. Chivalry in the medieval sense means testing virtues like chastity or courtesy. Interrogating what it means to be a knight. Gawain isn’t even a knight for most of the film. In fact, he and many other characters make a point to say he is no knight. He isn’t a revered hero humbled by this experience. He isn’t so committed to the chivalric code that he shows how absurd it is. He’s a young misanthrope who wants all the glory without any of the responsibility or effort. Who wants to be a knight for the wrong reasons. Dare I say he’s…the stereotype we associate with millennials (which, as a very old millennial who just barely made the cut, I resent).
I get that chastity as a moral construct is extremely outdated and unreliable in the modern world, and so a focus on selfishness vs. selflessness (of which Gawain shows very little) might make more sense. And, with a pandemic that is testing our collective sense of looking out for our fellow humans, I can see how a shift in themes would be timely. But the camera still lingers on the pentangle — a star-like symbol that represents five knightly virtues — only to carry no meaning in this version of the story.
What does carry meaning in this film, then? I’d say the shift in focus to emphasize facing our own mortality does hold the film — and all of its nonsensical and unsettling parts — together, albeit loosely. There’s a montage towards the end that very powerfully punctuates Gawain’s journey. Lowerey poses questions like, “How far can we let a fear of death drive our decision making?” And “Is self-preservation worthwhile when everyone you love dies around you?” But unless you’re up for pondering those questions deeply, and wallowing in the horrors of existentialism, look elsewhere.