The Green Knight is Beautiful and Bewildering

It takes more than a crown to make a king.

By Nick M.W.

This article originally appeared on Medium.com (8/9/2021).

The Green Knight is a clever re-imagining of the classic Arthurian tale of one hero’s journey, Gawain, the wannabe knight who prefers the idea of becoming a knight to the actual dedication and discipline it takes to become one.

*Major spoilers ahead!!!

This movie gives the viewer a lot to chew on throughout its running time and well after the credits roll. Director David Lowery crafts a layered film about the quest for honor and purpose (glorious purpose!) and what it means to be honorable. For Gawain, he seeks to become a knight, but dedicates most of his time to drinking and screwing his prostitute girlfriend, Essel, when he should be focused on mastering the five virtues of knighthood: generosity, courtesy, friendship, chastity, and piety. Every knight must possess these virtues, and Gawain is failing miserably at all of them, albeit without any meaningful consequences, as of yet. However, his mother, Morgan le Fay (half-sister to King Arthur, played by Sharita Choudhury), has it in her mind to teach her son a lesson that will help him realize his true potential.

The world that greets Gawain outside of Camelot is mysterious and threatening and indeed magical, and Gawain is such a noob when it comes to the world-at-large that he has no real sense of the dangers that await him from the moment he rides out on the trail. Dev Patel plays Gawain as both meek and cocksure; he has all the trappings of a knight: the sword, the shield, the armor, but he lacks the heart of a knight. Gawain quickly becomes a quivering mess when he meets his first threat, a group of young thieves that spring from the first trial of the five virtues, generosity. From there, Gawain encounters the other four trials until he comes face-to-face with the Green Knight. The film ends with Gawain coming to an understanding of what it means to be courageous and the consequences his ill-reputed ways will lead him towards. To be a knight is to be brave and chivalrous and generous, but it also requires one to be selfless. Gawain discovers this the hard way.

The party guy looking tough for his school picture.

It’s fair to say that there is a lot of weird shit going on in The Green Knight. Lowery takes some liberties with re-imagining the story, to its benefit. I like that Gawain trips out on some wild mushrooms and sees giants. I like the ghost of Winfred and Gawain’s spirit guide fox companion. The Green Knight himself is truly the thing of fantasy stories, an invincible adversary conjured from the Earth itself. However, there’s a scene that occurs when Gawain stays with the Lord and Lady that I didn’t quite expect. I mean, I read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight back in college, in a British literature class. This was almost 20 years ago, so I may not have it right, but I don’t remember any mention of male ejaculation in the poem. Am I wrong here? Avoiding lustful temptation in the name of being chaste seems like a familiar virtue espoused in the poem, and it’s an important virtue in this movie, but you see Gawain’s jizz. It’s a fantasy retelling of the tale, and I just thought that by “fantasy” they meant magic (present) and dragons (not so much), not erotica. It’s a brief moment that elicited a couple of laughs around the auditorium and one audible “WTF!”

Visually, from beginning to end, The Green Knight is beautifully shot and designed. A tip of the cap to the cinematographer (Andrew Droz Palermo), the production designer (Jade Healy), the art directors (Christine McDonagh and David Pink), set decorator (Jenny Oman), costume designer (Malgosia Turzanska), and the makeup department. I praised the Green Knight’s earthy design, but this entire crew created a world that effectively drew me in. I smelled the peat moss and felt the misty air that lingered throughout the movie.

I thought The Green Knight would have a bit more action to it. There isn’t much at all, and if you go into it expecting more of the sword and sorcery of Lord of the Rings than something that relies so heavily on character development, you will leave confused and disappointed, like the couple who sat next to me did. One of them even said, as the film closed, “this shit better not be over.” And… scene.

Stick around for a mid-credit scene that offers closure for those folks wondering what happened to our friend, Gawain, inside the Green Chapel.

7.5/10

Starring Dev Patel, Alicia Vikander, Joel Edgerton, Ralph Ineson, Sean Harris, Katie Dickie, and Sarita Choudhury