The Green Knight

THE GREEN KNIGHT   ***

David Lowery

2021

IDEA:  After agreeing to land a blow to the fearsome Green Knight, Gawain, the indolent nephew of King Arthur, must make a quest from the castle one year later to reciprocate the challenge.

BLURB:  More than many films based on Western folklore, The Green Knight has the air of something genuinely archaic and occult, like a cryptic relic from a long-extinct civilization. It’s in the film’s becalmed focus on gnomic rituals and encounters; its alternately tenebrous and ghostly images, in which computer-generated backdrops and expressionistic lighting lend a sense of the ethereal; and in its indeterminate temporality, with Lowery condensing hours, days, and years into a matter of minutes, a trick that connects back to his previous metaphysical fable, A Ghost Story. At the same time, the film constantly reminds us of its status as an adaptation, its literary intertitles positioning the story as a modern reimagining of a popular text. It’s somewhere in between these two modes - historical document and revisionist interpretation - where The Green Knight provocatively exists. Lowery already tips us off to the latter in his casting of the Indian-British Dev Patel in the role of Gawain; beyond this conspicuous ethnic alteration, the director also pointedly saps Arthurian England of its romantic grandeur, figuring it instead as an ashen, dilapidated graveyard dotted by fires. In this reframed context, Gawain’s quest to prove his chivalry and earn his veneration looks more like a hollow ego-driven pursuit than a testament of virtue. Throughout, Lowery draws out the faults in Gawain’s masculinity and the codes of honor he and the Court abide by, their stringent dictates exposed as essentially fruitless by the titular force of nature, rendered as a lumbering, immortal mass of tree bark and leaves. The Green Knight itself has a similarly plodding gait; despite its persistently entrancing atmosphere, the film could use a little more tonal variation to break up its overly stolid and studied demeanor. Still, it’s a haunting, sensorily rich spin on the Arthurian mythos that works as both a faithful adaptation and an astute reconsideration of its underlying concepts.