The Green Knight [2021]
"Indulge me in this game."
Like expensive hors d'oeuvres at a regal party that make you say, "ooo, I'd like more of that," as you pluck another splendidly presented morsel from a beautifully decorated tray, The Green Knight is a sight to behold and wonderful to consume... pieces at a time. Viewed as a full meal, however, you'll be left wondering what happened to the 2nd and 3rd courses after you finish delighting yourself on the appetizer.
David Lowery's The Green Knight is the perfect example of why adaptations have to be exactly that: adapted. It's a near perfect telling of the 14th century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight but it does nothing in the way of contextualizing the experience or translating it for audiences watching it onscreen. In some ways this is part of the charm of the original poem, in (most) others it makes the film difficult and obtuse at best.
Each chapter of the film (viewed entirely out of context) is wonderful. The cinematography is exquisite, the score is masterfully crafted, performances are stunning, and the production design as a whole is exactly what we have come to expect from A24. The Green Knight is an absolute sensation when viewed as a sensory candy shop. When smashed together though...
They seem to have their heads (pun intended) and tails cut off; leaving us with a bunch of pieces that don't really fit together but also don't NOT really fit together either. It seems like there was a lot left on the cutting room floor that would have created something contiguous but ,instead, they just wanted to smash in every visually impressive scene that could be smashed in. The chapters can be discussed until the knights come home in an attempt to make sense of their continuity, but even then they're held together by tenuous and metaphorical "this could be it" strings.
There are two things that I commonly talk about when speaking on film and its relation to the audience. Films that I like typically "trust" their audiences -- this means not holding our hands and spoon feeding us information. Saying something once and then acting on it, giving us visual information that makes sense to the characters and allowing us to infer the rest through logical on screen actions and dialogue. They "trust" us to follow along without needing to guide us every step of the way. Films that I typically don't like as much, don't "trust" us -- mentioning a character's political position every time they're on screen, boldly naming items and locations as they're pointed to so that we know exactly what they're doing at all times. They hold our hands, make sure we're tucked in, and come running every time we say "I'm scared". Knight does something entirely different, new, and frustrating.
David Lowery and crew are no strangers to strangeness. The crew for Knight is almost exactly the same as for 2016's A Ghost Story. Where Ghost trusted that its audience would follow along its strange and ephemeral pathways of love and loss through time, space, and everything in between -- rooting itself just enough so that we knew where we stood as the audience -- The Green Knight does not. It's not that it DOESN'T trust us either. Instead, Knight has managed to do something different in expecting things from us. It seems to expect that we know the source material and moves forward as though it was a college course and the prerequisite was reading the 14th century tale over the summer. (Merlin, I have to assume, is in the film for instance, but is never mentioned by name or title. So, if you didn't already know who he was, he just appears as a unique old man that makes the screen turn red one time.) Knight takes a very strange approach where nothing really clearly begins or ends and you take some stunning visual pieces away, but nothing of any real substance or value. You'll remember how the pieces looked and sounded but not how they made you feel, how you got there, or what really happened... and certainly not why it mattered. The film leaves so much in shadow, that there's nearly no light by which to see the rest.
While the last 10 or so minutes of the film are striking, fun, and meaningful, the possibly poignant message is so hidden between its seemingly damaged pages that most viewers will be bored beyond recognition of it... if they even make it that far. I think The Green Knight will receive wildly high reviews from ethereally minded artists, Arthurian poem enthusiasts, and indie film creators, but that its reviews will drop as time goes on. Films (even weird films) are supposed to be entertaining no matter how complex their source material is and, at the end of the day, this one simply isn't. Which is too bad, because it's a mostly faithful adaptation of the source material.
I wish it had been a little less faithful and a little more adapted because, as is, The Green Knight is a little bit like reading an outline for a piece of writing. The beginning is solid and well thought out -- the stakes set and the stage decorated -- and the ending is clearly conceived, meaningful, and complete... but the middle is just a set of sparse notes that never really come to life.
"Is this all there is?
-- What else ought there to be?"
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I encourage you to read the first link before you see the film, it will drastically alter your experience for the better. If you see it as a couple, maybe have one read it and one don't. With a base understanding of the source material, it's really something special. Then, afterwards, read the second link.
Poem Explanation
