The Green Knight
A24This film review contains spoilers.
Every now and then a film comes along where its first impressions are split, landing somewhere between accolades about furthering the medium or being purposefully opaque and self-indulgent. Darren Aronofsky’s mother! comes to mind, as well as Tom Tykwer and the Wachowskis’ Cloud Atlas. Although it hasn’t garnered as much controversy David Lowery’s latest, The Green Knight, is ripe for falling into the same category.
With vast deviations from its source material, the film assembles a perplexing and often baffling puzzle in which only some of the pieces fit. Young Gawain (Dev Patel) is the medieval equivalent of a trust fund kid, spending his time in brothels and bars between his appearances in court. His impoverished lover Essel (Alicia Vikander) wishes for a serious commitment, but it’s clear he doesn’t return her feelings. His uncle (Sean Harris) and aunt (Kate Dickie) happen to be King and Queen, so his conduct and social status is protected. What’s more, he seems fairly unconcerned with readying himself to ascend the throne, let alone rule a kingdom.
His mother (Sarita Choudhury) is the one who stages an intervention, enacting a spell that summons the otherworldly Green Knight (Ralph Ineson) to the King’s court, baiting Gawain into a fight he can’t win. Upon striking the Knight’s head from his body, Gawain learns the Knight can’t be killed and must meet him a year from then to receive the same blow. Only then will the Knight’s “game” be completed.
In spite of Patel’s natural charisma and seamlessly inhabiting this role, Gawain continuously proves to be careless, cowardly, and cipher-like. He makes no preparations for his appointment with the Knight, and Lowery seems bent on capturing his ambivalence with padded sequences in which Patel stares at other characters or into the middle distance. Once his hapless journey begins, the pacing remains ponderously slow and Gawain’s decision-making continues to be ill-advised, reckless or just plain inexplicable. He crosses paths with various characters along the way – played by the likes of Barry Keoghan, Erin Kellyman, Joel Edgerton, Vikander in a double role – but the story beats rarely resolve or explain themselves. The Green Knight remains firmly rooted in elliptic storytelling, uncompromising until an ending that implies some people are really better off dead (yes, it’s less ambiguous than you think).
Does the film really merit a 2 hour and 10 minute run time to reach this realisation? Aside from the its nearly universal acclaim, only time will tell. Lowery explained that the version in theaters is an expanded cut he worked on during lockdown last year, which suggests there may be a sharper and quicker version contained within what is currently onscreen. Still, regardless of the film’s pacing, its dream-like imagery – gorgeously lensed by Andrew Droz Palermo – and the magic in its narrative, it still can’t hold up under too much logic or scrutiny. It’s a film that begs questions that simply can’t be answered, like: why is the name “Gawain” pronounced differently from scene to scene? Did Gawain’s mother accidentally or purposefully curse her son? Why didn’t Gawain train himself to fight in the year he had to practice defending himself? Why would he abandon his only weapon after getting robbed? What was the significance of characters like the Scavenger (Keoghan) or the naked giants, since they appear and depart so quickly from the narrative? Why would Gawain not mention his fox companion to a hunter (Edgerton) whose fox hunts appear to be a favorite pasttime? Why does the fox suddenly have the ability to talk?
According to Lowery, most of these choices rested on making references to his favorite films and his own personal issues and preferences, which adds to the charge of self-indulgence. If The Green Knight truly is a puzzle, there are too many gaps left in the big picture and there doesn’t seem to be much interest in filling the blanks, making it a confounding experience.