Film review: The Green Knight

 

Messing with (your) heads…

Although it tells a traditional tale there is little that is traditional about The Green Knight. Washed in beautiful light and shade, every shot looks like an album cover so watching it makes you feel as if you have entered another dimension. It’s a shame that it was only fleetingly in UK cinemas as visual impact is tailor made for the largest screen you can find. What unfolds is a story with a flawed hero on a weird quest that is anything but triumphant or heroic leading to an elliptical conclusion. At the end its not entirely clear what happened or indeed why it happened. Amusingly one of the most asked questions on Google is `What is the point of the Green Knight? I’m not sure this movie will provide that answer; about the only recognisable aspect of any previous version is the round table.

 

It is too the somewhat down at heel court of the King who is never referred to as Arthur and played with a weary aspect by Sean Harris, that the Green Knight rides into. He’s depicted as a tree man, all gnarly branches, green skin and he makes a marvellous creaking sound with every movement. He challenges the Knights saying that whoever lands a blow on him will win his Green Axe (it’s a big axe worth winning!) but must return to somewhere called the Green Chapel a year hence and receive an equal assault in return. Being the sensible people they are none of the Knights take up this offer but the King’s cousin Gawain speaks up and courtesy of a loaned Excalibur slices the Green Knight’s head off whereupon our elemental chum picks his bonce off the floor and walks off.

This Gawain is no noble hero, far from it. He wastes his time enjoying himself and is something of a wastrel yet he sees this as an opportunity to make a mark for himself. Yet he then spends much of the next year carousing before setting off to fulfil his side of the bizarre bargain. Its an ancient tale so it has its moments that will make viewers puzzle notably the fact that Green Knight appears to have been created by Gawain’s own mother who it is implied is Morgana Le Fey. Quite why she does this remains unexplored, its certainly an unusual method to teach your son a lesson!

 Much of the movie follows Gawain’s increasingly unfortunate quest that sees him attacked, robbed and left for dead (Barry Keoghan is super  brutal here), meets a talking fox, pregnant giants and a princess who looks exactly like his girlfriend and lives with noble couple who both want to sleep with him! At times its difficult to tell which parts are even supposed to be real or simply hallucinations. If you watch expecting Middle Ages chivalry, gleaming armour, flying arrows, swooping dragons or colourful magic you will be disappointed. The slow pace of the early Camelot scenes is retained throughout. What we see is more like a fever dream in which time and place slips and slides. Even in the fiction of the story Gawain’s deed has become exaggerated  through re-telling (we even see a puppet show version of it). Mind you the original was from the fourteenth century so who knows what was in the mead back in the day!

This could of course all be quite wearing but luckily Dev Patel is playing Gawain and he is one of those rare actors who can sell anything. There is no attempt to make the character especially heroic or principled yet with Patel in the role you are rooting for him especially as his situation becomes increasingly parlous.  

The results may baffle at times- and odd sometime unfinished chapter titles are not necessarily here to help. However there is a beauty in the aesthetic that keeps you watching however odd things get. The emphasis appears to be that Gawain is a hero in his head who is waiting to be a hero in real life expecting that something will propel him to that goal. Perhaps his mother’s motivation in conjuring up the Green Knight is to turn him into the hero though none of this explains why he decides to take on the challenge in the first place- to impress his Uncle perhaps?

What will stay with the viewer even if they find the narrative too gnarled to fully grasp with one viewing (as I did tbh) is the sensational visual feast laid out before you. Director David Lowery, cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo and the effects team create a feast for the eyes and ears.  One stunning sequence occurs after Gawain has been robbed and bound to be left to die in the middle of a forest. The camera swings away from him and as it turns so the seasons pass and when it comes back to rest on Gawain he is a skeleton!  Such care and attention is taken with every frame that it seems almost like painting rather than film making. The colour palette is extraordinary even on the oldest tv like mine- rich verdant greens, autumn browns, dusks, dawns and shadows. don’t light the interiors any more than they would have been meaning some of the details inside are murkily seen but you don’t even mind. All the time Daniel Hart’s incidental music taps, ticks and creeps, as much a part of the story as the visual textures. 

Various critics and reviewers have tried to interpret the film’s narrative (my favourite is one that concluded it could mean anything and everything!) but like myself are mostly defeated. It’s a film that perplexes and challenges probably requiring more than one viewing to absorb all it has to offer. Its not for everyone but give it at least that one viewing and you never know.