“The Green Knight,” David Lowery’s beautiful, sometimes baffling medieval epic starring Dev Patel, has inspired equally passionate acclaim and dissent from critics and audiences.
More titles announce the name of the lead character “Sir Gawain” in different lettering, pointing to the idea there is more than one way to tell a story.
Writer-director David Lowery and star Dev Patel present a young man attempting to find his way, fearful that he has nothing to offer the world: Gawain, wastrel nephew of King Arthur and not yet a knight, impulsively accepts a challenge from the Green Knight and perhaps assigns himself to death.
There are many questions raised along the way, without many direct answers.
I’m a big admirer of Lowery and his work, including “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints,” “A Ghost Story,” “Pete’s Dragon” and “The Old Man & the Gun,” which also trafficked in a certain poetic reverie.
Enveloped, too: The fog that clung to my glasses as I breathed through my mask seemed to merge with the mist rolling through the movie’s magnificently craggy landscapes .
Given Lowery’s delight in excavating old cinematic and literary archetypes, it seemed intuitive that he would leave behind the rural Americana of his earlier work and dive into the fertile and, yes, muddy soil of Middle English lore.
Mercy is something Gawain lacks at first, given the callow, callous blow he deals the Green Knight during their initial challenge.
But for me there seemed to be mysteries tucked within mysteries in almost every frame of Lowery’s film, and I found myself delighted, rather than irritated, by the fact that it seemed in no hurry to solve them.
JEN YAMATO: Asking more questions than it answers, or may even have answers to, makes “The Green Knight” an apt release for A24 — a distributor that knows its audience so well, they’re already selling a tie-in RPG game that retails for $35.
In all the chatter surrounding the film, however, few think pieces have concretely identified Lowery’s narrative intentions.
If you don’t know Morgan le Fay from her sister Morgause, for example, you’re already behind the game compared with those deeply versed in all manner of Arthuriana.
The stakes of Gawain’s side quests don’t quite add up to the life-changing shift the film’s ending projects, and those CGI giants feel slight but for the fact that the one Gawain cowers from is female, tying into how chivalric values go only so far in a society built around lionized toxic masculinity.
Tolkien, who famously published his own translation of the poem, when it comes to the genre of adventuring young men and the mythological beings they meet en route to some kind of fated, earned greatness.
It’s one of the ways in which the pandemic delay of more than one year for the film’s release has perhaps been a benefit — audiences are primed for a movie of confusion and ambiguity by the simple fact that has been so much of their own recent experience.
Still wearing the protective sash that has been given to him twice, assured it would save him from harm, he has a vision of what his future will hold, one of betrayal, loss and defeat.
But was that ill-fated vision only one possibility or a certain destiny? If in fact the Green Knight does not take his head and end his life, what will Gawain have learned from his trials? Will it be mercy, as Justin has suggested, or a sense of humility and definition of purpose, realizing that his life of wasted days and wasted nights will lead only to a dreary end? I don’t know if a deeper knowledge of the original text, in whatever form, will actually help in answering any of those questions, as the movie continually folds back in on itself.
Not that I begrudge anyone their impatience with “The Green Knight,” which certainly moves to its own leisurely rhythms and delights in playing a confoundingly circular game with the audience.
That includes its rich array of allusions to other movies, from Ingmar Bergman’s medieval epics to “The Last Temptation of Christ.” Like a lot of folks, I thought of Martin Scorsese’s passion play when I saw Gawain’s grim vision of the future, which reinforces the idea that “The Green Knight,” like its source material, can be read as a parable of Christlike suffering and perseverance.
I didn’t think of “Apocalypse Now,” but Mark, you’ve clearly hit on something there; what is “The Green Knight” if not a journey into Gawain’s own heart of darkness? Does this mean that someday, we’ll get a longer, undeleted version of those scenes in Lord Bertilak’s castle? I hope so, especially since Joel Edgerton and Alicia Vikander make such a dangerously seductive duo.
The implicit connection between the Lady and Morgan le Fay is further driven home by the fact that they both offer Gawain that damned sash, an amulet of protection that becomes a kind of Achilles’ heel.
It suggests that there’s less of a difference between the pagan world and the Christian one, between decency and desire, and maybe even between God and humanity, than we like to think.
YAMATO: Yes …
King Arthur and Round Table-adjacent stories have been told and taken from so often, it’s tough to make a new telling feel fresher than the derivative works that cribbed from them.
But you said it, Justin: There’s a real dank, human lustiness to “The Green Knight” that brings the genteel, courtly ideals of Gawain’s social programming crumbling back down to Earth.
As a meditation on mortality, time and how we choose our fates, it’s a cinematic puzzle that demands to be met halfway between the screen and the mind.