David LOWERY (Dir.),
“The Green Knight”, Sailor Bear Productions/BRON Studios/A24, 2021.
Longtime readers
know that I am a fiend for canon, and that that obsession extends into many areas,
not only Lovecraftian material. I am a keen Arthurian devotee, and I first
discovered the travails of Sir Gawain when I was 13 or so, at about the same time
that I discovered Tolkien. At that point I was devouring anything that carried
the ‘T-word’ on its cover and so, naturally, I found Tolkien’s translation of “Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight” in the volume which also contained his version
of the Pearl manuscript and the adventures of Sir Orfeo. Sir Gawain
has been a constant companion of mine ever since.
The Arthurian
story-cycle derives from many sources, some historic and some mythological, and
the body of lore that it contains and which it reveals has been added to and
re-worked by many scribes across an enormous period of time. It’s as if
centuries of creative effort have formed a narrative landscape which is
familiar to all who walk across it. To my mind, that landscape – the canon lore
– is fundamental to the understanding of this material. Without it, working
with the concepts is pointless – you would be better served creating your own
story from scratch. I believe that canon – no matter for which genre, or lore,
it forms the substrate – is sacred: one messes with it at peril. Others feel that
canon is there specifically to be broken down and discarded: that’s fine; each
to their own. We are all free to make our own ways with this stuff. It frustrates
me, though, that people with the iconoclast mentality then try to insert their
own stuff into the canon, the very thing that they’re rejecting out of
hand. What they should really be doing is just making up their own stuff. This
is what David Lowery should have been doing too.
To begin this
dissection, let’s take a look at Sir Gawain. Of all the knights of Arthur’s
Round Table he is the one that has the most originally distinct character – that’s
after Lancelot, of course. Many of the knights have been built upon by later
authors, and their characters have been established and crystallised over a
period of re-telling. These personalities usually derive from attempts to
explain why certain, seemingly inexplicable, narrative events take place. Thus,
Sir Kay’s penny-pinching and resentful mien was identified by Thomas Malory and
retrofitted into the other stories concerning him, while Sir Pellinore’s fusty
and distracted attitude was built-in by T.H. White to suit his own narrative
purposes. It’s arguable that the seeds of these personalities are discoverable,
lying dormant in the canon, and so highlighting them in this fashion is entirely
reasonable. Gawain, however, has had his own personality from the start.
Gawain’s “origin
story” (if I can so express it) is that he is descended from the Orkney Kings,
a son of Queen Morgawse, sister to Morgan-le-Fay, herself a half-sister of King
Arthur. The Orkney knights have always been depicted as blow-in hayseeds,
uncultured and wild, and an unsightly family obligation for Arthur to bear.
Gawain is the eldest of the Orkney lads – who include Gareth, Agravaine, Yvaine
and Mordred – and, as such, he is constantly corralling the others and trying
to get them to behave in a manner becoming their status as royal scions.
Sometimes this puts him on Arthur’s side, sometimes it doesn’t – a very
political animal is Gawain, and his resentment towards such characters as
Lancelot and Galahad is often palpable. At some point early on in the
proceedings, his mother’s magical nature and faery heritage gave him some
magical abilities – specifically, his strength increases from sunup, peaking at
twenty-fold by midday, before dropping back down again by nightfall – but some
writers choose to overlook this quirk. It remains, however, that Gawain was
formed as a personality from the start, not just some characterless cipher, or
spear-holder, about whom some foibles accreted over time as the need arose.
This being said,
many of Arthur’s knights take on a particularly characterless flavour in the
hands of some authors. Each knight strives to be an ideal, and this reaches its
apotheosis in Sir Galahad: Galahad is not a personality at all; he’s a
collection of idealized responses that represent knighthood in its most evolved
form. This form was established by Arthur but corrupted before its final
flowering by the need to make him a political agent; it was revived in Lancelot
and then ruined by his romance with Guinevere (and further tainted by his
incessant sleeping sickness and subsequent madnesses); and then it was imprinted
upon Galahad as a ‘personality’. Whenever the spotlight turns to highlight
another knight on his own particular journey – Sir Gareth, or Tristan for
example – they often take on this idealized character for some, or all, of the
narrative. In “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” Gawain wears this
personality too, and keeps it until close to the end, when his political nature
arises once more. His essential character always comes through in the end. In
this film, with Dev Patel playing him, Gawain is once more true to his nature,
despite everything which Lowery – as writer and director - does to try and
break him.
(I should point out,
too, that no-one in this movie has a name apart from Gawain and his girlfriend.
Arthur is listed as “a King” and Merlin is “a Sorcerer”. Perhaps Lowery was
trying to factor in some plausible deniability along the way? For the rest of
my rant, I’m going to use the characters' actual names and not play into Lowery’s
coy games – it feels like too much of an insult to do otherwise.)
Moving on, let’s take
a closer look at the plot of the original poem, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”.
It begins with a Christmas feast during which Arthur declares that he will not
eat until a fantastic tale, or a demonstration of some wonder is presented to
him. Almost at once, the Green Knight appears to offer a challenge to the King:
if he will take the ‘Knight’s axe he can deliver unto him a blow of his choice;
he will not resist the strike, on the condition that – one year hence – Arthur
will journey to the Green Knight’s abode and there receive the same undefended
strike from the ‘Knight in return. As a matter of political expediency, Gawain takes
on the King’s role in this exchange and – angry at the Green Knight’s
effrontery – cuts that fellow’s head off. Untroubled by this, the ‘Knight gets
up, retrieves his head and tells Gawain he will see him next Christmas to
settle things. The challenge is thus set: Gawain waits a year and then sets out
to pay his dues.
Along the way, he
encounters a manor owned by a gracious Lord and his Lady. It’s a day’s journey
to the Green Knight’s home and there are three days until Gawain must go there.
The Lord invites Gawain to stay and rest: he says that he intends to go hunting
on each of the next three days and that, if Gawain will keep his lady company,
the Lord will give Gawain anything he obtains from that activity, on the
proviso that Gawain will give him anything that he receives while resting in
the manor. While the Lord rides out to the hunt, his Lady embarks on a campaign
of seduction against Gawain, who is forced to work his hardest to deflect her
attempts without insulting her. He capitulates only to give her a kiss, which he
trades for the fox which the Lord brings him that evening. On the next day,
Gawain is forced to yield up another kiss in exchange for a deer. On the third
day, the Lady plays dirty pool: she offers Gawain a magical green girdle that
will turn away all blades directed at him on the condition that he sleep with
her. With his head at risk, Gawain does the deed, and, when the Lord shows up
with a dead boar, gives him only a kiss in exchange for it, knowing that he is
lying in order to save his own skin. In the final confrontation, the Lord is
revealed to be the Green Knight in disguise, and he knows all about the girdle:
thus discovered, Gawain rejects the magical protection and submits to the
decapitating blow, only to be spared by the ‘Knight who praises his tardy
truthfulness and gives him his axe as a token of honour to be taken back to
Arthur as evidence of the strange tale.
These then are the
tentpoles of the story. Even in this bald outline, we can see the stakes at
play, and we know the pressures under which all of the characters are acting; it’s
clear what is going on and why. If one was inclined to re-tell this story, it’s
possible to embellish the elements and to play with the trappings of the story
as seems fit; however, if you move the tentpoles, you do so at your peril. In
this instance, that’s just what David Lowery has done – he has broken the
narrative and now it longer makes any sense. Or rather, it makes the sense that
he wants it to make; it’s just not clear exactly what that is as
far as the viewer is concerned.
What is very clear
in this movie, is that the director knows his Arthurian canon and that he knows
it very well. It’s therefore even more baffling to see him break the narrative
in the ways that he does. Primarily, he lays the origin of the Green Knight and
of the magical girdle in the lap of Gawain’s mother – in this tale she comes up
with both of them and the rationales behind them - along with their places in
the narrative – become frayed and contentious. If the Green Knight is some test
of Gawain’s mettle devised by his mother, then why is it so deadly, and why
does Morgawse react with such surprise afterwards? If Morgawse is the source of
the magical belt, then why have the sequence with the mysterious Lord and Lady at
the end of the film at all? Here, unequivocally, the Green Knight and the Lord
are distinct entities, the ‘Knight being an embodiment of Nature in the Green
Man style, so why have the hunting sequence? The stakes have been removed from
the game and, therefore, so has the point.
Replacing the core
elements of the tale, Lowery lays on a bunch of nebulous blather about Gawain’s
romantic life with an outcast girl played by Alicia Vikander (who, confusingly,
also plays the role of the Lady), a bunch of travelling thieves and an
encounter with a Welsh saint. None of which add to, or deepen, the narrative in
any meaningful fashion. Sure, the tale of St. Winifred centres on decapitation,
but why do we need to foreshadow something that’s been a burning issue since
the opening act? Perhaps if the director had increased the pace of his screenplay
and kept an eye on the clock, the viewers wouldn’t need such a reminder by the halftime
mark. And why introduce material that has absolutely nothing to do with the Gawain
legend, the story at hand, or anything to do with Arthurian lore at all? It
reads as if the director got bored and wanted to play with other toys for a while.
Pacing is definitely
an issue with this film. There are scenes which carry on for too long, shots
that meander when they should be direct and to the point. Too often the camera
lingers on a sheep or a flock of birds when it should be moving us to the crux
of the scene. The opening sequence has a Hieronymous Bosch-like panoramic
quality to it where the frame encompasses a wide number of elements each of
which is suggestive of a larger story happening elsewhere; this is fine, but as
often as the director indulges in such scenes, he forgets them later on. We
spend too much time watching a single horseman walking from one side of the screen
to another, or travelling the length of a long road comprising a single shot,
and the story suffers as a result. This film is over two hours long and it
doesn’t sufficiently reward the viewer for that investment. Rather, it punishes
the audience, ridiculing them for engaging with it.
For instance, most
of what goes on in the movie takes place in almost total darkness. Whole
sequences are obscure, hard to fathom and basically impenetrable: the director
could literally have left the lens cover on the camera whilst filming and we
would have been just as informed as to what was taking place on screen. Perhaps
he was trying to capture and impart a sense of a world without constant
lighting such as we enjoy nowadays? It’s anybody’s guess, but surely there are
better ways to do this in a visual medium. Such obscurity is normally code for
the fact that the special effects are less than acceptable; here, when they’re
visible at all, the effects are gorgeous and effectively realised - it seems
that Lowery just wants us to not clearly see everything that he’s committing to
film, for some bizarre reason of his own devising.
There are chapter
divisions in the narrative, each headed by a title in a font which keeps
changing as the film progresses. Why he couldn’t have picked one font and stuck
with it I’m not sure, but to me it was distracting and weird. The section with
the thieves is called “A Kindness”; the bit with St. Winifred has its
own title; the one after that is simply called “An Interlude”. What? The
previous two meaningless encounters weren’t “interludes” as well? Of course
they were, but Lowery is playing around, and he’s slapping his viewers for
giving him the time of day. In the end, all of these inserts into the narrative
serve no purpose at all and are hugely indulgent, no matter how pretty they
look (when you can see them at all).
What’s left is a
long, tedious shemozzle. We wander along in Lowery’s idle footsteps following
meaningless tangents which he instills with seemingly pregnant energy before
dropping them and getting back to the main point… whatever that is. And it’s a
shame: there are very few Arthurian stories committed to film that are any good
and this could have been one of them, except that it feels like the director
was sulking and wishing that he could have been doing something – anything –
else. If “at least it was better than that earlier version with Sean Connery in
it” was all that he was going for, then his work here is done, I suppose. The
cast is great, the settings nicely realised, the costumes wonderful; however, like
so many things served up as entertainment these days, the bones are bad - the foundations
are crap. Perhaps Lowery should have just sat behind the camera and left the
writing to someone else, someone who wasn’t trying so hard to be too clever by
half. And perhaps he could have hired a lighting specialist while he was at it.
Two-and-a-half
Tentacled Horrors from me.
All too often these days we get people who KNOW the lore and canon without UNDERSTANDING it one whit. Like with this movie, and especially now with comic books.
ReplyDeleteThis is where abominations like the Zack Snyder comic book movie adaptations come from; using elements of the canon while lacking a fundamental understanding of the characters the movies are supposed to be about, to the point of completely reversing the central truths of the character. Thus we get Snyder's Angsty Objectivist Superman, who seems to be just morose and put-upon for "being forced" to actually use his Godlike power to save pathetic insignificant humans, instead of just living a life of isolated wandering as Snyder apparently believes he would prefer to do. Snyder apparently thinks that Superman is actually a remote, Godlike alien entity who has difficulty understanding humans and can't connect to them, and whose only attachment to humanity is through Lois Lane, which is just an utterly bizarre interpretation of Kal-El's character.
And then from the fan end we get all those comic bros who for some baffling reason LOVE Snyder's abominable travesty of a Superman, who think that Kal-El acting all emo and angsty over his being different from humanity ("Oh no my Godlike power makes me different, my life is such a curse!") makes it "mature"... because they really don't understand the character at all, and because they are arrested adolescents who mistake grimness and violence for maturity.