Rating: R
Runtime: 2 hours, 10 minutes
Director: David Lowery
Quick Impressions:
Several people have now told me they’re eager to read my review and learn my thoughts about The Green Knight. My reaction is, “Me, too!” I cannot wait to read this review and figure out what I thought about David Lowery’s take on the medieval classic. (The trouble is, I have to write it first.)
I can say this much immediately and without reservation. The Green Knight is better than Sword of the Valiant. (Those of you who have seen that lesser-known Sean Connery effort will realize that’s setting the bar pretty low. When I discovered that VHS in the rental area of H-E-B when I was nine, I thought I had stumbled upon such a find, an epic adventure the entire family would enjoy. With Sean Connery! “Why haven’t we ever seen this?” I wondered in my naïveté as I eyed the compelling scene on the box.)
I watched The Green Knight on Saturday. (I’ve been excited to see it for over a year and was gleeful when it appeared for home rental.) It’s taken me so long to write about it because first I decided to reread the entire poem just to be sure it didn’t contain a woman whose head was secretly in a lake (more of a pond, really). (Spoiler alert for the medieval poem: It doesn’t.)
The movie does contain such a scene. (That’s not much of a spoiler because the scene is not essential to the plot.)
After the film, I said to my daughter, “I don’t know why that woman’s head was in the lake. There should be a scene like that in every movie. The protagonist encounters a woman who says, ‘My head is in the lake. It doesn’t look like it is. But it for sure is. I just wanted you to know that.’ And then the story just continues after that scene. They go on their family vacation or on a stake out, and the movie never explains why that happened.”
“Does that happen in the original story?” she asked.
“Not in any version that I remember,” I replied, “And I’m pretty sure there’s only one version. I mean I think there’s only one manuscript of the Pearl Poet’s works. Of course, I’ve been out of school a long time. Maybe they’ve discovered another one that says in the margins, ‘PS, there was this one woman, and her head was in the lake. You couldn’t tell by looking at her. Just thought you should know.’”
That scene reminds me of a ghost story, specifically of a movie called Ghost Story that I insisted on watching on TV when I was six. I had nightmares for weeks afterward. I’ve haven’t seen it since I was six. I just remember that a bunch of actors from classic Hollywood (like Fred Astaire) are in it. They have sex with a beautiful woman, and then it turns out she’s been dead in the lake the whole time. (I think it’s because they killed her in a car wreck. Maybe accidentally? But they left her down there.) There’s one scene where her body becomes gory and desiccated, and she rasps something like, “Don’t you want to see what you’ve touched?” (It scared me to death! I thought, “Note to self, if you ever have sex with a woman, make sure she’s not actually dead in a lake first.”)
As I watched, I reflected that this particular scene seemed inspired by recent horror much more than by Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I thought immediately of Netflix’s take on The Turn of the Screw. (I see now that Lowery directed a film called A Ghost Story in 2017. I’ll have to watch that. I liked The Old Man and the Gun and Lowery’s Pete’s Dragon (well enough).) I will admit, of course, that women do seem to come popping up out of lakes all the time in Arthurian legend, so perhaps the scene is inspired by some other medieval source that mentions Gawain and his adventures.
I’m not a medievalist, but I did briefly entertain the notion of becoming one. In college, I discovered I liked medieval lit. My roommate took a course on Arthurian legend with a favorite professor of mine, and she used to come back and tell me what she’d read in class as a bedtime story. (If I’d taken the class myself, I would probably have a firmer idea of what content medieval sources actually contain.)
I’m far from an expert on the poem, but I have read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight many times (first in high school and most recently yesterday). It was the first written work that made me think seriously about genre. (In high school, I found it hard to skim because it kept doing things I didn’t expect. Initially I thought it rambled on episodically, including unnecessary material and lacking focus. Then I realized that the poem was meticulously crafted; I was the one who lacked focus. In my ignorance, I hadn’t known what to expect from it.) I read Gawain at least twice in college (with two other professors I really liked).
Then my first year of grad school, I took an entire course on Pearl and spent a semester reading not only that poem, but criticism pertaining to the works of the unknown Pearl Poet (who also wrote Gawain). (We talked, among other things, about the Ricardian Renaissance, how scholars were just discovering the extent to which culture had flourished at the court of Richard II.) I decided with excitement that for my dissertation I would discover the identity of the Pearl Poet. This prospect thrilled me for days until I suddenly realized, “And how will you do that, Sarah?” (I had visions of wandering through the library, suddenly getting hit on the head by a falling book containing a secret confession on a vellum scroll hidden in the spine.) I read Gawain again in a fascinating course on Middle English dialects (which I never should have taken since I’m no linguist. The passage we read for self-evaluation at the beginning of the course was so difficult for me. Chaucer is one thing. This author lived nowhere near Chaucer. After I struggled for hours, the words finally started to make sense, and I relaxed a little—until I realized that part was in Latin! Maybe I should take a different class, I thought, but I had my schedule carefully arranged so that I could hurry home to watch Jeopardy! with my mom after school). In the medieval dialects course, we read Tolkien’s commentary on Gawain. (That’s the version I’d hoped to reread because I remember it having a facing page translation, useful for someone with my poor grasp of Northwest Midlands Dialect but desire to have access to the original language. I know Tolkien’s around here someplace, but I could only find Marie Borroff.)
The Good:
Rereading the poem confirmed my initial impressions. Lowery’s film is not faithful to the source material, but it is informed by it. I’d say it’s in conversation with it. This is the most thoughtful adaptation of the source material I’ve seen. What we get is not a faithful retelling of the poem, but a deliberate subversion (perhaps even inversion) of the Pearl Poet’s work. If you’re a medievalist or simply a Gawain enthusiast, I would watch the film. You may not like it, but it does strike me as the work of someone who wants to engage with the source material and adapt it for the present age to make a statement. If I were teaching a course about Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, I would include the film in the material studied simply because it could generate such productive (and no doubt lively) discussion. Also the film has some of the most gorgeous, striking visuals I’ve ever seen. It’s worth watching for that reason alone. Filmed entirely in Ireland, The Green Knight’s landscapes are gorgeous, and its visual aesthetic is mesmerizing and provocative.
The cinematography is the film’s most obvious strength. It’s so captivating that no other reason to watch the movie is needed. It’s not simply that shot composition is gorgeous—though it is; the colors pop—it’s that the film’s visuals create such an unsettling mood. Watching The Green Knight filled me with a pervasive dread, an unsettling feeling of horror. Most of this feeling is generated by the film’s visual style, as well as its reliance on that visual style to convey the truths of the story.
This film lacks the clarity of the poem. The viewer feels like Alice in Wonderland, disoriented and bemused, uncertain of how to interpret these unfamiliar, unsettling visions. We’re being asked to do the work and find the meaning ourselves. I’d want to see the movie a second time (or third or fourth) before I felt comfortable saying with certainty what writer/director Lowery wants us to take from it.
I think it serves as a provocative companion to the poem. The film leaves us alone with our interiority. We must feel, think, interpret, react. The poem doesn’t give us much interiority. On this reading, I particularly noticed that. We don’t get to know what’s going on in Gawain’s head, why he makes certain choices, what his motivations are. (Instead, we get to see parallel events, juxtaposed for us so that we may figure out the psychological aspects for ourselves.) But this movie seems to be largely about Gawain’s motivations. It asks non-stop questions about why he chooses every single choice he makes. He must find these answers, and so must we.
Some glaringly obvious superficial differences between the film and the poem jump out immediately. In the poem, Arthur and Guinevere are young, and Gawain is already established as a strong, virtuous knight. In the film, Arthur and Guinevere are old. (Arthur seems to be near the end of his life.) Gawain is untried, without particular accomplishments. He is asked to sit next to Arthur for the first time ever. And he is neither strong nor virtuous. He is markedly full of weakness and vice. Sir Gawain in the poem usually makes the choices of a virtuous knight. The movie seems to argue that there are no virtuous knights, that virtue and knightly behavior are inherently opposed. What Gawain considers virtuous in the beginning of the film looks pretty bad, actually. His society’s virtues are rotten. (Other notable differences—it takes forever for Gawain to reach Bercilak. I don’t think Bercilak is ever introduced by name, and he never identifies himself as the Green Knight. The green girdle—while significant—is not used in the same way. And here Morgan Le Fay appears to be Gawain’s mother, not his aunt, although admittedly, that is not completely clear.)
I would be stunned if Lowery hadn’t read the poem and given great thought to it, though. Key images and symbols from the poem pop up everywhere in this movie, but they’re used in surprising (often baffling) ways. Images from the poem are present, but they don’t signify what they seem to for the Pearl Poet. One thing I love about Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is its neatness. This is deliberately messy and ambiguous instead. I also love the poem’s emphasis on reciprocity and its positing of an orderly universe full of clear meaning that can be discovered. The movie advocates a messy universe where nothing is fair or even comprehensible. There is no virtue in the so-called virtuous.
To me, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has always had a certain eeriness. This film presents it as a horror movie (a very slow-paced horror movie). For me, that works (though the film is much more dread-inducing than the poem itself). I got a similar feeling from watching the film I’m Thinking of Ending Things. While watching that, my husband and I began asking each other if it was supposed to be a horror movie. (We hadn’t thought so going in, but it rouses the same kinds of sensations as a horror movie as you watch.) This movie is also dread-inducing and might be a good thing to play in the background at a Halloween party.
In general, I liked the performances, especially Dev Patel. He and Alicia Vikander are pretty captivating, and I wish that Barry Keoghan had hung around longer (although I kept wondering why his character was in the story in the first place). Patel has a much larger part than everyone else, and he’s emotive and engaging, bringing a lot of depth to the character. I also particularly liked Kate Dickie as Guinevere. Sean Harris is fine as Arthur (though I’m not sure why he has to be so decrepit that he speaks like he’s been gargling sawdust). The film makes the extremely interesting choice of not making The Green Knight (Ralph Ineson) and Bercilak (Joel Edgerton) the same person. (I don’t think the film uses the name Bercilak. I’m not sure it uses any name except Gawain.) What’s particularly interesting about the film’s choice not to make Bercilak and the Green Knight the same person is that Gawain’s lover Edsel and the lady in the castle are both played by Alicia Vikander. I don’t think they ever call Gawain’s mother (Sarita Choudhury) Morgan or suggest that she’s the old woman in the castle, but his mother does seem to be Morgan le Fay in this version. I found Choudhury’s performance intriguing enough to wish we saw more of the character than we do.
Best Action Sequence:
This is not a very action-oriented movie. I didn’t like the scene in the woods with the bandits (because it confused me), and I didn’t like the following moment in which we see the skeleton (because it confused me, too). The bandits confused me because I didn’t remember them. The skeleton confused me in a different way, making me question my own perspective and the nature of the reality we were seeing unfold. Even though I did not exactly like these moments, their bewildering chicanery does prepare us for the long fake out of the ending.
What I did like was our introduction to the Green Knight, the scene of celebration at court. Up to this point, the film’s likelihood of being reasonably faithful to the poem seems rather high (far more promising than Sword of the Valiant at any rate). My husband protested that all of that witchy conjuring doesn’t happen in the poem. I replied, “Well, it kind of does. You just don’t see it. You don’t know about it yet.” I liked all of the sinister magic going on in this scene. (But admittedly, I kind of like witches.) I was intrigued and curious about where the movie was going, what it intended to do.
Best Scene Visually:
Visually, the movie doesn’t have a bad scene. And the scenes aren’t just easy on the eyes. They’re arresting, pointedly charged with meaning (but we don’t know what the meaning is!!!!). You see them, and the imagery is so dramatic that it looks like iconography. You think, “The meaning of this should be obvious.” But it isn’t. That’s provocative. I’d love to watch the film again.
There’s one moment in which we see an image of the fox (a tapestry, a painting, I’m trying to remember) that jumped out at me at the time. And the girdle is used so differently in this film than in the poem. Trying to keep up with everything going on there is dizzying!
Best Scene:
This isn’t the best scene, but I can’t help it. I’m obsessed with that woman whose head is in the lake. This scene doesn’t even seem to belong in this story. Its general vibe really does remind me of The Haunting of Bly Manor. Watching, I thought, Is this going to devolve into what 2021 enjoys as horror, or will it continue to be a take on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight? I love this scene and would watch more of this story. It lends itself to psychoanalytic criticism. (That’s what really interests me about this movie. The text of the poem does not reveal much about Gawain’s motivations. He just takes action. He always tries to do what is right, guided by his faith and his dedication to being a knight. But this movie is almost entirely about why Gawain does things, and why he should do things, and how he feels about what he does, and what motivates him, and what he should do next. And there are so few answers and nothing to guide him!) (Also I feel kind of bad for the headless woman. He’s standing so close when he just drops her head on the floor! That must be disappointing for her.)
The Negatives:
I was disappointed to discover that the idea of reciprocity—so pointedly featured in the poem—is totally absent in the film. The nature of the game Gawain plays in this movie is so bewildering. It seems to have no shape and no rules, and there’s no way to win. (Perhaps that’s the movie’s point.)
It takes forever for Gawain to arrive at Bercilak’s castle. (Feels like hours!) Waiting for Bercilak reminded me of waiting for Harrison Ford to show up in the new Blade Runner movie. As I watched, I couldn’t say for sure that none of Gawain’s adventures in this very draggy portion of the film weren’t in the poem. I was afraid they were all mentioned in one line I had forgotten. And indeed, when I reread, I discovered that there was brief mention of giants. (Basically just the word giants. The movie stretches this into a very long sequence.) And the idea of Gawain hiding in the cave is suggested by the poem, too. But as I watched, I knew the movie would not have time to execute (properly) what I have always considered the central part of the poem. (I mean the aspect of reciprocity we get here in the castle. In the poem, while Gawain stays in the castle, Bercilak goes out hunting on three consecutive days. He suggests a game to Gawain. Whatever he gains while hunting, he will give to Gawain. In return, Gawain must give him whatever he gains while waiting in the castle.) This part of the poem is quite important, but the movie really rushes it and seems to drop the idea that the interaction between Gawain and the Lady in the castle mirrors the nature of the hunt and the animal Bercilak is hunting that day. I don’t know why the film muddles the story here so much. What happens in the castle is still compelling, but I think Lowery could achieve his own goals in the same style he uses and still keep more of the poem’s structure here. He could remain true to his vision for this part of the film and enhance what he gives us by drawing more heavily on the poem.
Also, the Christian imagery and the meaning behind it is dropped from the movie. Early on, I believe we do see a pentagram, but it looks very sinister. The poem gives so much attention to the pentangle and the theological meaning behind it. I think it’s a mistake that the movie drops all this. The film would be richer if this material were included, even if Lowery wants to place so much emphasis on witchcraft and show the failings of patriarchal religions. Even if he wants to make a film that discounts the value of Gawain’s piety, I still think he should explain and incorporate the religious imagery.
I guess for me the issue is that I do like what Lowery is doing—in the sense that I find it a very interesting spin on the poem and a film that effectively uses imagery to build and sustain an unsettling mood. But I think incorporating more material crucial to the poem would have enhanced the story, even as Lowery wants to present it.
I also am not sure I understand the ending of the movie. Part of me suspects it’s a condemnation of the entire human race, but the rest of me thinks it might be a condemnation of only half of the human race. I really need to watch it again…about seventy times.
Overall:
Yes, I need to watch this movie again, but it was a rental, so I can’t for the moment. The Green Knight has the most spectacular (and baffling) visuals of any movie I’ve seen for a long time. It’s worth at least one watch for sure, but I don’t know how anyone will react to it. (I’m not completely sure how I feel about it even now! I like it, but it’s quite a departure from the source material). If you like sumptuous and intellectually provocative imagery, be sure to stay awake. (The movie is slow, but it’s still a visual feast.)