“The Green Knight” and The Green Knight
Last night I saw an advanced screening (thanks, A24!) of the new film “The Green Knight,” written and directed by David Lowery and starring Dev Patel and Alicia Vikander. One of my former “Arthurian Literature” students worked on the film, which is how I ended up with a free pass to a theater in Boston among what seemed to be a group of actual film critics. Their preshow chatter was littered with mile-a-minute references to films from “Wild Strawberries” to “The Departed.”
I’m not a film critic; I’m a scholar of medieval literature. So my take on the film has a lot to do with how the film adapts and modifies its literary source, the fourteenth-century anonymous poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (SGGK), a chivalric romance. SGGK is a perfect literary work. I don’t use that term lightly. It is crystalline in form and narrative structure, with an unusual stanza form that allows for full, lush descriptions of the characters and the natural world while still propelling the narrative forward. The story itself is structured around the idea of reciprocal “games,” tests of knightly courage and honor in which the stakes are real and urgent: loss of life, the betrayal of deeply held beliefs. Even as these games are set up as equal exchanges, the poem reveals that there is no equality among men, and therefore no possibility of coherence to the ideal symmetries it constructs. Grace, forbearance, and forgiveness must fill the gaps where our imagined ethics clash with a messier human reality.
The film takes a different narrative and aesthetic approach. Visually, it is extremely dark: indoor scenes in gothic castles lit by candles, outdoor scenes shrouded in fog and mist in bleak, unforgiving landscapes. Even in crowd scenes the filmmaker favors extreme close-ups that emphasize the emotional weight the characters bear. While SGGK deals with serious themes, the beauty of its poetry and its symmetries imparts a kind of joy, a sense of order that, if not fully available on this earth, promises redemption. The film The Green Knight is rarely joyful, and the marvelous Dev Patel, whose intensely committed performance is one of the film’s greatest strengths, barely seems to enjoy himself even in scenes of sexual intercourse. A heaviness hangs over the entire film that betokens the existential conflict present in the original poem’s themes but not its style.
Narratively, the film sacrifices SGGK’s simplicity of line for something more expansive. It’s closer to the Arthurian legends of Sir Thomas Malory, who lived a century later. Malory’s work is encyclopedic to the point of being elephantine: it exhaustively chronicles and in many cases interprets the adventures of all of Arthur’s knights, generally divided into episodes. If you’ve never read Malory but you’ve seen “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” you have a sense of how Malory’s episodes work.
“The Green Knight” feels like the plot of SGGK was rewritten by Mallory and then reimagined by Guillermo del Toro. The film invents new episodes, especially during Gawain’s journey to the Green Chapel, and grafts them onto the original plot. It announces each episode with a large title in Gothic black letter. The episodes and the titles felt extraneous. Why tinker with the perfect plot? Why tell us what we are about to see when seeing it is enough? Why add horror and fantasy elements (the Green Knight’s altered voice speaking through Guinevere’s mouth, androgynous giants roaming through a valley) to a story whose strangeness is captivating enough on its own? As someone who loves the original poem, I yearned while watching the film for it to return to the aspects of the medieval text that make it a classic.
And yet. Lowery does something deeply moving and astonishing with the tale’s climax, in which Gawain must accept the Green Knight’s blow which — given the knight’s strength and other-worldliness — Gawain believes will kill him. Without giving any spoilers, I’ll say that the additions Lowery makes to the original story here justify changing it. The writer-director offers a deeply moving interpretation of the struggle between our internal ideals and our outward actions that conveys this struggle to a modern audience while hewing to the film’s medieval setting. The great theme of SGGK is shame, and shame is not currently a fashionable emotional state to explore. Our culture increasingly tries to unmake the traditional sources of shame, often by undoing or disparaging their Judeo-Christian — i.e., its medieval — roots. That’s usually a good thing. But shame is not so easily banished. Like a river, it finds new channels when its old ones are dammed up.
Even as I found this filmmaker’s choices deeply frustrating, I couldn’t dismiss the film. It haunts me, visually and thematically. I tell my students that all Arthurian literature is a cultural translation of an imagined history, because all of this literature — including the medieval stuff — was written several hundred years after Arthur is supposed to have lived. That means that every instance of Arthurian literature we have, including the fourteenth-century poem and the film, is using an idea of history to reflect on whatever is urgent for the time and place that produced it. And for all of the film’s flaws, there is an urgency to it. “The Green Knight” recognizes that something that mattered seven hundred years ago still matters today. It tries to show us how, and it sometimes succeeds.
