The Green Knight begins with an incantation of sorts, so I suppose it makes sense that watching the movie feels like being cast beneath a spell.
A riff on Arthurian legends from writer-director David Lowery, the film stars Dev Patel as Gawain, a young royal in the king’s court enjoying his privilege while not yet taking on the heavy responsibility of knighthood. During one Christmas celebration, however, a towering, mystical Green Knight interrupts the proceedings and throws down a challenge―one that Gawain, in a rash impulse, accepts. The challenge not only involves a showdown then and there, but another confrontation, “one year hence,” at the Green Knight’s chapel deep in a faraway forest.
And so there is a quest, but one that’s told with the same unhurried manner Lowery brought to films as varied as Pete’s Dragon and A Ghost Story. Narrative aside, it’s enchanting to simply sit and soak up the misty, mordant landscapes that Gawain traverses―some where the very air is tinged with an acrid orange. (The sumptuous cinematography is by Andrew Droz Palermo, who also worked on A Ghost Story). The Green Knight himself (Ralph Ineson) is masterfully envisioned: with a face of bark and a massive axe, he appears cut from a tree even as he seems poised to fell one. Indeed, when he moves, we hear the sound of cracking branches.
As Gawain’s quest continues, the movie registers more as a series of visual mood pieces than an adventurous knight’s tale. In one, Gawain encounters a sorrowful ghost whose request sends him diving into a deep, yawning pond. In another, he’s set upon by thieves and left, tied up, to die in the woods. The camera slowly circles the area, charting the changing seasons, until it returns to Gawain, who is now a skeleton. It’s magical foreshadowing―a hint of what will happen to him if he doesn’t manage to get free.
This leisurely pace isn’t the only thing that distinguishes The Green Knight from a more standard cinematic work of sword and sorcery. There is also the subversive streak at the movie’s center. Rather than a rousing portrait of medieval gallantry, the film asks: What if you don’t want to be a knight? Then, later: What if you do, but you don’t have what it takes? And, ultimately: Does the legend waiting to be told about you care either way?
At its heart, The Green Knight is about the very idea of legends and myths: how they grow, what they reveal, what they conceal. Fairly early in his journey, Gawain comes across a muddy battlefield, still littered with corpses. A jittery young man (Barry Keoghan) scavenging among the bodies claims that the king had been part of the fray and killed 900 men on his own. But we know, as Gawain does, that the aged king is unable to leave his castle.
Gawain isn’t above such burnishing when it fits him. Asked by the scavenger if he has ever used the enormous axe he carries (the one the Green Knight granted him), Gawain says, “Here and there.” The scavenger points to the battlefield and asks, “Here?” Gawain backtracks: “Mostly there.”
This bit captures the cleverness (and comic touch) in Patel’s performance. His Gawain is self-deprecating in amusing ways, yet he also knows how to play the part at times (and Lowery’s camera loves framing Patel in those moments as a dashing hero). It’s a turn that’s at once self-conscious and self-aggrandizing, yet Patel never loses our overall sympathy. Also very good is Alicia Vikander, who has a dual role as a waif Gawain romances back in the drinking halls at home and the regal wife of a blustery game hunter (Joel Edgerton) who presides over his own castle in the middle of the wilderness. As the latter, Vikander gives a riveting soliloquy about nature―its very greenness―being a verdant force that inevitably covers and swallows up anything erected by man.
That speech is another spell, occurring about the film’s midpoint and carrying you off in a daze to the movie’s final sequence. There, The Green Knight ends majestically, but also humorously―not on a laugh line, necessarily, but something that could more aptly be called a laugh lop.
