Directed by: David Lowery
Starring: Dev Patel, Alicia Vikander, Sarita Choudhury, Ralph Ineson, Joel Edgerton
Rated R, 129 minutes
“The Green Knight,” David Lowery’s new adaptation of a 14th-century Arthurian romance, is a messy masterpiece. As a reinvention of the classic hero’s journey in filmmaking, it’s stately and immersive; as an adaptation of an old legend, it’s both faithful and refreshingly modern. Yet its construction is loose, with an almost improvisational feel to the staging and editing. Disorienting as it can be, it couldn’t succeed any other way.
Lowery (“Pete’s Dragon”), who also wrote the script, reframes the story of Sir Gawain as a coming-of-age tale, with Gawain (Dev Patel, “Lion”) presented as an adolescent loafer who lives off his mother (Sarita Choudhury, “Lady in the Water”) and spends his time drinking and carousing with his girlfriend, Essel (Alicia Vikander, “Ex Machina”). Eventually King Arthur himself tells Gawain to leave his idleness behind and take up a heroic quest to prove his valor. That quest promptly arrives in the form of the Green Knight (Ralph Ineson, “The Witch”), a lumbering spirit who looks like a tree stump and wields a massive battle axe.
The Green Knight offers him a challenge: Gawain may strike one blow against him, but in one year Gawain must seek out the Green Knight at his forest chapel and let the Knight return the blow with equal force. Gawain accepts the game and, after a nervous deliberation, dramatically beheads the Green Knight. Lowery, to his great credit, leans fully into the intensity and inherent strangeness of the moment (the scene features the memorable image of Ralph Ineson’s languid Knight picking his own head up and walking away). The result is that, even in the arbitrary world of the chivalric romance, it’s easy for us to suspend our disbelief. We too feel the weight of Gawain’s fateful act and of the quest to follow.
Set in an England somewhere between history and myth, Gawain’s journey to the Green Knight’s chapel is bleakly scenic but beautifully filmed, from ominous cliffs and desolate valleys to battlefields of fallen soldiers and brooding forests where bandits lie in wait. In a rare concession to opulence, the movie takes us to a secluded manor whose Lord (Joel Edgerton, “The Great Gatsby”) and Lady (also played, hypnotically, by Vikander) offer Gawain a suspicious abundance of comforts to aid him in his quest. He inadvertently becomes famous, the news of his quest spreading through the land, but his burgeoning fame in this primeval world, where the idea of fame doesn’t quite exist yet, makes him uneasy.
It’s not all grim, though. The movie possesses an off-kilter sense of humor that emerges whenever Gawain encounters characters that have come out of their own worlds to give him some perspective. The spirit of St. Winifred asks him to retrieve her head from the bottom of a spring; a fox befriends him and follows him for days before finally opening its mouth and speaking outright; Gawain comes across a group of giants and asks if he can ride on one of their shoulders for a while, but they respond in soft howls that only the fox can understand. Episodic adventures like this have always presented a challenge for filmmakers used to writing with a three-act structure, to say nothing of the tale’s fantastical sense of logic, but Lowery navigates these challenges deftly, tying the pieces of Gawain’s journey together with visual threads and choice moments of suspense. And rather than play Gawain with the bravado or the aura of predetermination that often accompanies such epics, Dev Patel imbues the role with curiosity. Gawain’s tale is so compelling to us because Patel allows it to be surprising to him.
This experimental vision of a 700-year-old story is an extravagant reflection on masculinity, on mythmaking, and on honor all at once, but “The Green Knight” is blissfully untethered to any one reading. Rich in symbolism and repeating images, full of peculiar characters with memorable idiosyncrasies, and paired with a beautiful score that combines the eerie and the pastoral, “The Green Knight” invites multiple viewings, if only to take in the lush details in every frame, the aesthetic variety in David Lowery’s freewheeling ambitions. When Gawain finally arrives at the Green Knight’s chapel for his own beheading, he faces his executioner with total bewilderment. By that point, we’re in a state of bewilderment too.
Originally published in The Harvard Press on 9/3/21.