| Director(s) | David Lowery |
| Principal Cast | Dev Patel as Sir Gawain Ralph Ineson as the Green Knight Alicia Vikander as Lady / Esel Joel Edgerton as Lord Sarita Choudhury as Morgan Le Fay Sean Harris as King Arthur Kate Dickie as Queen Guinevere |
| Release Date | 2021 |
| Language(s) | English |
| Running Time | 130 minutes |
| Report Card | Click to go to Review TLDR/Summary |
NOTE: This is a new release and the review is based off a theatre viewing. This means the review won’t feature common elements like visual analysis, extended theme analysis, or long-form discussions of the cinematic techniques being used. Once I am able to get a copy of the movie to watch, pause, analyze, and get stills from the review will be updated to match the current site’s standard.
The movie starts on our young knight-to-be Gawain (Dev Patel) waking up in a brothel partaking in booze and making merry with women. It’s clear from his appearance and familiarity with the surrounding that this is nothing out of the ordinary for him. In direct contrast to our expectations, the nephew of the great King Arthur (Sean Harris) seems anything but coming off more like a loser getting by on the name of his family – lazing around in hedonistic fashion as opposed to doing anything suggesting knightly values.
He comes home to his mother, Morgan Le Fay (Sarita Choudhury) where he’s admonished for his unkempt behavior, cleaned, and then sent to to feast with King Arthur and Queen Guinevere (Kate Dickie) and the members of the round table. At first he sits afar from the king and partakes in the splendor of the feast but is then summoned by Arthur to approach the place closest to the royal couple. It’s here where Arthur asks his Gawain to tell the couple Gawain’s tale. Gawain’s expression sours as he responds he has no tale to tell at which point he’s interrupted by Guinevere who reminds him that he’s still more than capable of engaging on journeys to experience and then provide such tails. As if to answer her claim, the room darkens and a large figure, the Green Knight (Ralph Ineson) approaches. He asks the crowd around him if there’s a knight willing to play a beheading game with him. Gawain uncharacteristically accepts the “call to adventure” and lops off the figure’s head. The Green Knight reveals that he’s very much alive while grabbing his lopped head and tells Gawain to meet him at one year’s time to receive a similar blow.
A year slowly passes in the town. Gawain drinks and frets at the prospect of having his head chopped off; unlike the knight, he can’t grow his head back. He is championed by the city who finally views him as aligning with the knightly virtues he’s expected to align with while dreading having to act good on what those virtues entail. This duality is reflected in a puppet performance that we (and the town) get to see on repeat – a microcosm of the larger story – that shows Gawain lopping off the Green Knight’s head, gaining honor, and then losing his own head and dying. In fact, Gawain is literally forced onto his journey by Arthur. Thus, the story begins.
The setup, due to it’s nature as adaptation of the poem, aligns perfectly with the “hero’s journey”. Gawain starts off in his “normal” world as a vagrant getting by on his family’s name. He is “called to adventure” by the Green Knight. Based on the structure of the journey (and the poem proper), Gawain would meets a mentor/helper who guides them through problems until eventually he has to come to terms with the issue himself. They he would be “reborn” and come back to his original realm changed. However, as Gawain proceeds on his adventure it becomes clear that director David Lowery has made some huge changes to both the story and the nature of the hero’s journey itself. He runs into mentors of sorts, but each encounter with them feels more like an impediment than anything, making it unclear who is ally and who is foe.
Each character he runs into – a young boy (Barry Keoghan), a headless ghost (Erin Kellyman), a horde of giants, a fox, an overly accommodating Lord ( Joel Edgerton ) and Lady ( Alicia Vikander) – presents a scenario that is both analogous to Gawain’s own fear of the outcome of the beheading game whilst simultaneously representing one of the five virtues of knighthood: chastity, courtesy, friendship, generosity, and piety. Every scenario presents Gawain a choice he can make – a duality that is represented not only in vibrant symbolic color shifts (red to green) but also in methodologically slow paced scenes which literally demonstrate Gawain’s contemplation of what the future holds. For example, early on in his journey, Gawain is left for dead. The camera starts on him and slowly arcs around one way before coming back on him dead – the fate that awaits him if he doesn’t act – before arcing all the way in the opposite direction to show him in his original position. This constant repetition not only reinforces that death is always in the background as a finality but also makes it abundantly clear that honor is always a choice and a choice that one has to undergo by themselves.
While this goes against both expectation and the poem itself, that doesn’t mean that Lowery’s adaptation is inauthentic. It’s precisely in the way that it deconstructs knighthood shines that it is then allowed to appreciate the importance of the virtues. The adaptation functions more like a dialogue between Lowery, the poem, the nature of knighthood, and the audience proper. What the virtues represent and the way they’re handled in the poem proper are questionable in some parts, namely the ending (something I agree with). The adaptation challenges these moments by examining them under the framework of what the virtues would actually entail in an attempt to determine what a true knightly journey for Gawain would actually entail.
However, the consequence of what these moments actually mean are up to the interpretation of the viewer. The movie is littered with sprawls of text that seemed ripped from the poem and plastered into the world of the movie – a combination of the diegetic and non-diegetic elements. At one point, Gawain’s name shows up on the screen in rapid fashion and font styles like something out of Climax’s multiple title drops. These textual intrusions become something else when Gawain eventually runs into a Lady who informs him that she likes to collect texts and modify them in places she thinks could use work. Thus, the adaptations’ changes can be seen as a direct response to the source work itself while also suggesting the world of the movie is one of constant interpretation. The intentional ellipses in meaning aren’t meant to confuse as much as meant to draw the audience into conversation on what honorable action would mean in that situation. The movie pushes this to the extreme by ending the story near halfway point of the traditional hero’s journey, inviting the audience to come up with their own ending.
In many ways, the narrative shares a similarity to Bergman’s The Seventh Seal which follows a knight, Antonius, looking for meaning in a world filled with suffering and God’s apparent silence. As he goes from spectacle to spectacle, he tries to gleam some kind of meaning from God. Here, Gawain is not considered with the silence of God as much as he is with the ambiguity on what it means to be a true knight. Like Antonius, he goes from scene to scene trying to determine what an honorable knight would do and like Antonius he never receives any kind of confirmation that what he’s done is in accordance with this ideal.
For those of you looking for a straightforward narrative that follows the traditional beats, this may be a deal-breaker. However, to those looking for an immersive experience that’s fully drenched in the mysteries and splendor of Arthurian mythos there’s rarely been something quite as ambitious and joyous to experience. Even just ignoring the visual spectacle- beautiful color grading and scene construction which emphasizes contrasts and themes combined Lowery’s slow unwavering long shots – and the score which feels mystical and rustic (any score with chanting has a good chance of sounding epic), the host of Easter Eggs and nods to the legends of the Round Table make this a must watch. Lowery never draws overt attention to any of these details but naturally incorporates them to make the world feel lived and textured. The world is magical and mysterious so many events and situations just happen with no given explanation letting the audience draw their own conclusions on who’s doing what and why. The end result is we’re as disoriented as Gawain , going along his journey with him in the truest of senses. Now that’s bringing a story to life.
REPORT CARD
| TLDR | The Green Knight perfectly encapsulates the themes, mysteries, and sense of allure Arthurian mythos inspires in its deconstruction of the poem of Gawain and the Green Knight. This is a movie that challenges and invites the audience to parse meaning at every moment, refusing to offer any easy way out to some predetermined answer. Anyone who likes engaging with movies as dialogue and/or wants to experience a lived in Arthurian visual and auditory vision owes it to themselves to check this out. |
| Rating | 10/10 |
| Grade | S |
Go to Page 2 for the for the spoiler discussion and more in-depth analysis.
Go to Page 3 to view this review’s progress report .