The Green Knight

Or: How to Get A Head in Life and Politics

Brush up your Monmoth / Start declaiming him now. in A24’s adaptation of the ancient story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight there’s a lot to be gained by showing up to the party with a pocketful of arthurian lore. It’ll guild the movies sly moments, and sweater the heavy ambiguity that sloshes across the film, but it’ll also help you get over the high fence of “what the hell is Gwain’s Mother (Sarita Choudhury) doing, dabbling with sorcery and setting her boy up on a suicide quest?)

Admittedly, Sir Gawain (Dev Patel) is in need of some kind of kick to the keister. Nephew to a proud and gentle King (Sean Harris), is an unmotivated drunken lad, who spends his time drinking, mumbling, drinking, shortchanging a working girl Essen (Alicia Vikander), looking for the come up to prove his valor without too much inconvenience, and of course, drinking. He’s a rich your swain in need of a season or two of hard labor and perhaps a good authority figure to teach him honor. Instead, one Christmas party, a mysterious knight (Ralph Ineson) rides into Camelot and challenges the knights of the round table to a little holiday sport, The Beheading Game! Gawain seeks to prove his mettle, but underestimates the knights ability to keep his head when all others are losing theirs, and is left with a year to find the Glen of the Green Chapel and render up his own luscious locks (and gnarly nape, and sweet skull) in recompense.

As before mentioned the script and screen do a lot of subverting and hallowing of the roots of the Green Knight mythology, and it certainly worth a read up. But a movie exists in the dark, in the moment it unfolds for you. And while it’s certainly intelligent, the movie is rarely smart. It relies on tricky and tricksome camera work and odd side shoots of story that fail to congeal. Moreover, everyone mumbles. There’s hardly an understandable line of dialog to be had (with the exception being Erin Kellyman as St. Winifred the justifiably irked.

There’s a lot to recommend the movie. A haunting score, the wilds of Scotland (your rich and vibrant post-post apocalyptic wasteland), a truly lovely way of conjuring light and of course, Dev Patel (often shirtless, always a plus). He truly hammers out the callow youth, waffling between becoming grace and or curdling into cowardliness, stitching the line between chivalry and toxic masculinity. It’s just a shame he isn’t given as much to work with, and the beats of his quest might be more ascribed to wild mushrooms than personal development.

The finest moment of the film is Gawains extended stay with an unnamed lord and lady (Joel Edgerton and Vikander, again), which borrows more for tales of the Fae. It’s the finest moment of what the movie could’ve been, casting its own shadows of what has been and might be. Both of Gawain’s hosts, carry a michevious, carnal excitement between them. But alas, it’s back to the 80’s acid dream sequences, all too soon.

I must confess I left the theater confused, and saddened, and with the feeling of having confined two hours and a great deal of hope, to the middenheap (the CGI fox is particularly egregious, what has happened since the days of Middle Earth and Narnia’s adaptations?) I did not feel met, but rather exposed to someone’s vanity project. It’s not a version of the story that I see surviving, but it will serve as another brick in walls of Camelot. Just not as a particularly shining one.