Very much its own poem/film: The Green Knight

Visually, this is one of those films that cries out to be seen on the big screen. It’s very much a trippy flick, but there’s oh, so much more, to it than visuals. Nor is it a mish-mash of random “symbolism” that you might associate with “deep” (read: stoner) flicks from the seventies.

To be clear, it is not a Middle Ages sword and sorcery movie, although magic is very much throughout. Nor is it a stolid, faithful telling of one of Middle English’s great epics; oh, but no. It is, however, by turns poetic, lyrical, ribald, real, fantastical, well-acted throughout, reflective, and multi-layered thematically. 

Oh, and it’s funny, too. Not “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” but witty, by turns. 

All of these elements it shares with its source material which, if you haven’t read, you really should. It’s a short read, but so rich and well told, you can go back and read it repeatedly and get something new out of it each time.

Similarly, I suspect David Lowery’s interpretation is going to be worth multiple visits. Lowery also penned and directed “A Ghost Story” and “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints” and is yet another Texas filmmaker worth paying attention to. I don’t know why Texas can produce some of the worst politicians but some of the most brilliant auteurs. Nevertheless, more like this, please.

The story is simple in its summary: Sir Gawain, King Arthur’s(1) nephew, is invited to sit by Arthur’s side at the Christmas feast, and when the titular knight appears with a challenge, a jeste, if you will, for one of the esteemed knights to land a blow in return for which, he - the good Green Knight - will repay the blow in degree and kind a year hence. No one takes the challenge and Arthur himself, either bound by a spell as he says he doesn’t know what is halting him, seems unable to move. Gawain volunteers, Arthur hands him Excalibur and off goes the Green Knight’s head. Arthur impresses on Gawain the seriousness of his deed and his oath as a member of the party. (In this telling, Gawain is not yet a knight and among other changes to the tale, has no deeds with which to regale Arthur or the court; he is greener than the Knight whose head he has lopped off.)

The actual Green Knight (Ralph Ineson)

The Green Knight’s body picks up the head that reminds Gawain of his charge and exits. 

Well. Not bad for a start. 

Suffice it to say, a year passes quickly, Gawain’s feat has attained already legendary status and is being told and retold in puppet shows, and he bids farewell to Essel, the prostitute with whom he is in love and she with him. She doesn’t think much of his dedication to seeing this through and entreaty him to stay, but of course, he will not. 

He dons armor, a shield, and the axe the Green Knight kindly left behind. His mother, Arthur’s sister, Morgan La Fey, has fashioned a belt for him charmed so that he can withstand any blow. And Essel has gifted him a small bell on a necklace. He rides off and adventures ensue.

He meets a conniving, double-dealing teenage thief on a battlefield where many dead do lay. He is waylaid in a wood by the thief and his distaff accomplices, stripped of the axe, his armor, and even his shield, now broken in two. The young miscreant claims he will ride forth to slay the Green Knight. 

These are two stills from a remarkable sequence after Gawain  has been waylaid.  Even in this static form, you get a sense of the kind of compositions and images encountered in the film.

They did have the courtesy to leave him his sword so he could free himself and continue on his way along which he meets Saint Winifred, a fox spirit, giant collisi, and eventually, finds rest at a kind hunter’s castle whose wife bears very much the image of Essel. He tarries there but for a while as there are yet a few days before he must meet his fate and during that time, the Lord’s Lady evinces her interest the young not-yet-a-knight. 

Do make sure to click on these (and other) images jato enlarge them; Palermo’s cinematography is striking.

Gawain is more than a little uncomfortable with the encounter but she bequeaths him a belt identical to the one his mother made for him and that was stolen from him by the errant lad and his accomplices. The axe, by the way has reappeared, and Gawain bolts up from what is a disappointing dalliance in his hostess’s eyes. The young man runs toward the general direction of the Green Chapel and in the woods finds the carcass of a slain animal and his host who asks him why he is leaving so soon. 

Gawain pretty much says he wants no gifts or further hospitality from his host (and not really as rudely as I make it sound), but his host bids him tarry. Earlier, the man had asked Gawain to give him something he found in his own house to him (the man) as an exchange of gifts for the lavish Yuletide provender to come. Gawain is taken aback by what sounds more like a riddle than what could be considered a true quest. 

Alicia Vikander as the lady of the castle

We may assume that the Lord had something like a kiss, stolen perhaps or given freely, from his wife, when the man plants a kiss upon Gawain’s lips. Or - maybe he just digs Gawain. Dev Patel is awfully cute.

Ere long, Gawain arrives at his destination and what unfolds there we will circle back to anon. But what’s important to bear in mind is that the deviations from the epic are marked with deep thought and lend the tale a contemporary meta-narrative and genuine richness that may not be quite as foreign to the Gawain poet as we might think.

And yet, of course, very much foreign. 

Here’s the thing: while the Gawain poet was very much of his time, and did know very well the rules of the traditions of chivalry and was very much a Christian of his time, it’s telling how aware he (or she? I don’t think the Gawain poet’s gender has been questioned, but it would make it interesting if the poem were penned by a woman…and in some cases, might even make sense) is of the foibles of the codes of chivalric behavior, even of the lauding of glory and perhaps, to some degree, the tragedy of keeping one’s words, even at the cost of one’s life. The poem is a sardonic picaresque that while not satirical, is more alive to the tragic nature of the consequences of dying for one’s word and mines no small amount of irony from that context. 

Of course, at the end of the day, the fourteenth century work is very much on the side of valorizing courtly honor and being true to one’s word even at the loss of one’s life, and Lowery’s take is very much an interrogation of that. For us (post-) moderns, Lowery has more on his mind, though, as well.

While Patel’s Gawain is very much in earnest about keeping his part of the bargain, the larger question posed by Essel stands. We do understand this Gawain, though: he’s a young man who would be a member of the king’s court, but recognizes that he has not lived, has not a tale to tell, much less one of valor or adventure. In sum, he’s a kid. 

But he has love; or at least, is loved. Essel cares deeply for him and Alicia Vikander shines in both her role as Essel and the Lady of the house we meet later. The twinning plays to good effect and maintains the already dreamlike nature of the film. When he posits that he is going to pursue his quest for honor, she dismisses the notion: “This is how silly men perish. Why is goodness not enough?”

Sita Choudhoury’s Morgana (here Gawain’s mother instead of his aunt, which renders Gawain’s fate more intimate and the play of the pagan witch against the Holy Roman court more acute) is a woman of great depth of knowledge and love for her son, but we have to ask if she did not see that she had doomed her son to death. Why did she conjure the Green Knight? If it was to provoke or vanquish her brother, it is possible that she didn’t count on Gawain being the one to take up the Green Knight’s challenge. 

She reveals little sense of loss in his fate and that might be owing to her faith in her own abilities as a witch. To say to him “Is it wrong to want greatness for you?” gives us a framework to work with, and it is true that she has sewn for him a belt that will protect him from any blow, so we can perhaps see how and why she would set this wheel in motion. 

There’s another question that Lowery raises: the play of the Faith against the Old Ways, where the former is more accepting of Death and change and the other, an Eternal Beyond to journey to once loosed of earthly bonds. Gawain, even in the poem, is not a direct Christ figure, but certainly here he is something of a martyr to conflicting ideals and philosophies. As portrayed, Gawain doesn’t suffer much. He’s open to whatever life gives him, repeatedly, all the way down to his fate. 

This isn’t to say he’s a passive toy in the play of forces nor his a suffering bastard, exactly. His frustrations are writ large on his face, as well as his perplexity, and what draws us in is his growth along the way. If Lowery has constructed a representative Hero’s Journey, it’s undercut/paralleled by the insistence that said hero’s journey is as much interior. 

The visuals really do speak to an almost literary, expansive telling; but Patel’s performance is very much rooted internally, on his face and in his words. He questions everyone, and defines himself by his words and actions. 

There is such a hallucinogenic quality to the tale that we could possibly accept the idea that much of it is the result of the mushrooms Gawain ingested midway through. 

After being waylaid, and fumbling his way along, at one point Gawain decamps in a cave and meets a fox. I’m more spurred to read the fox as less a furry mammal than a spirit or familiar because of the way it interacts with Gawain between here and the denouement when the animal begs Gawain, in Morgana’s voice, not to go forward on the journey. 

It’s after meeting the fox, by the way, that Gawain eats the ‘shrooms and eventually meets a wandering group of giants in one of the most beautiful sequences in modern cinema (I refer you to the photos above to get some idea of that). 

I was going to try to refrain from doing the “well, this didn’t happen in the poem”, but it’s instructive to note that the changes Lowery did make render the narrative more internal. In the poem, his stay at the lord’s castle is over a period of several days of well-attended parties and it becomes clearer what the gifts exchanged are: the lord’s wife attempts to seduce Gawain over a period of three days and at best, gets him to kiss her. Each evening, the lord comes home with a bounty - a slain deer, boar, fox - and each time Gawain according to their deal - gives the lord a kiss commensurate with that which he had received from the lady of the castle. 

In Burton Raffel’s translation(2), the premise is set up thus:

The lord has welcomed Gawain graciously into his home and and assures Gawain that he may rest and stay as long as he likes. 

“..sleep and rest are your needs. I know that, knight, 

So lie in your bed, high in this house,

Till mass is sung tomorrow, and eat

When you please, and with my wife: she’ll keep

You company, amuse you until I make 

My way home.”

Then comes the hook:

“And more: we two can make a bargain:

Whatever I earn in the woods will be yours,

Whatever you win will be mine in exchange.

…

Shall we swap our day’s work, Gawain? Answer

Me plain: for better or worse, an exchange?”

To which Gawain readily assents. 

In the film, Patel’s Gawain is uncertain about the terms and precisely what the Lord of the Manor meant. In the film, there is no nightly quid pro quo; that comes as Gawain flees the castle and the kisses exchanged are, well, sensual.

Not only do Lowery’s changes to the source material render it more subjective but also, open up the text for greater exploration and questioning. It would be simplistic to characterize Lowery’s interpretation as a mere coming of age story, despite how inexperienced his and Patel’s Gawain is throughout. But his revisioning also allows for interrogating the priorities we put on different values and social requirements.

The idea of a knight’s virtue and the code of chivalry are pretty irrelevant today; however, the journey to find oneself and be true to that highest sense thereof are constant guide stars for us. Could Gawain have opted to stay with Essel and been a knight, regardless? Probably. Lowery offers a more intriguing proposition, though: given the nature of Gawain’s milieu, his family, and his own expectations of himself makes this Gawain a more interesting character for us contemporaries. 

He still longs for a hero’s quest, but what he finds is far more interior. Oddly (or not so, on reflection), Lowery presents us with an inward journey of a young man finding himself. The outward narrative may or may not be rich in symbols (it is, more than likely), but the end result is that Gawain finds himself facing himself when he eventually confronts the Green Knight.

Unlike the poem and I mention this because it is instructive as a study in contrasts and buttresses the film’s narrative architecture, the “why” of the Green Knight appearing in Arthur’s court is never overtly explained. Lowery trusts the audience to come to its own conclusions (rare enough in film these days). 

In the poem, it is rendered more clearly how this was all set-up by Morgana La Fey. The Green Knight was requested by her to submit this challenge “to test your pride, to determine the truth of the Round Table’s fame”, hoping that seeing this great knight speaking after his head was cleaved from its body would “addle your brains, would frighten Arthur’s queen and kill her with fear…” She must have known, too, that Gawain, the greatest and bravest knight of the court would take up the challenge. She also wanted to test Gawain’s virtue and hence, the three mornings spent with the lord’s lady were to test Gawain’s greatly famed moral fiber. (Also, unlike in the film, it is the lady who bequeaths Gawain the belt to resist the fatal blow.)

I also mentioned that Lowery makes Morgana Gawain’s mother. It’s intriguing that it is from the Green Knight in the poem that he learns of his heritage. Again, by not delving into Arthurian legend and rewriting the relationship, there is a greater stake here. A mother is, for all intents and purposes, sacrificing her son.

This last may bother some people and it did me, for a bit. I believe Gawain’s fox companion is his mother speaking to him at the last moment to dissuade him from following through to his demise (it is the lord’s attendant in the poem that sues for Gawain to retreat); but I think it’s clear that in order to fulfill his quest, Gawain must find himself free of/from others’ choices for him. In a lot of ways, Gawain is almost Camusian in his search for and establishment of his identity.

Much has been made of Lowery’s decision to borrow from Scorsese’s cut-away in “The Last Temptation of Christ” that shows Jesus living out a normal life, and here the pay-off is similar: Gawain sees and alternative life where he flees with his life and lives one of shame, conquest, and ultimate failure. 

Here again, the switch from the source material is telling and resonates more with us than, perhaps, the epic. In the poem, Gawain asserts that he failed three times to truly preserve his morality, and that he wore the green belt to preserve his life. The Green Knight lets all this slide, for the most part: he recognizes what it takes for Gawain to admit all this, to confess how he failed, and he sees how far short Gawain in his own eyes feels he’s fallen. As it happens, in those final stanzas of the meeting between the two knights, we discover that the Green Knight is none other than the lord of the castle and the lady his wife. There is, after all, a resonance for us here; forgiveness of self and others, but recognizing and owning our short-comings helps us grow more fully. 

Indeed, in the epic, Gawain tells the Green Knight that he’ll wear the green belt as a reminder of his cowardice and failure. When he returns to court, of course, he reveals all to the King and the Order of the Knights of the Round Table and according to legend, in the following years, all the knights themselves wore a green tunic. 

In the movie? Nope. Three times, Gawain flinches and three times, the Green Knight readies his axe. After the pre-cognitive passage of Gawain’s possible life, he declares himself ready for the blow. The Green Knight applauds Gawain’s rising to the moment, applauds Gawain’s newfound sense of courage and more, of self. And wryly, his last words are, “and now, off with your head.”

It’s a remarkable film. It’s also a textbook case of why filmmakers often have to revise and change the source material. Oftentimes, it’s for ensuring the film falls within a certain allotted time; characters are combined or excised, chapters omitted or rewritten, and so on. Then you get to hear people complain that a film is “not as good as the book”, “nothing like the book”, and all that. 

In looking at “Crime and Punishment”, Freund’s adaptation with Peter Lorre, sure; there’s a world of difference but there’s a truth at the center of that film in Lorre’s performance. He is Raskalnikov. The particulars of the novel are gone, for the most part. How is anyone going to compress a novel that vast and profound into an hour and a half or two hours? The point is that it ranks as a great movie because it got very much at what Dostoevsky had achieved. 

Here, Lowery had to toss out significant plot points and introduce new elements. Admittedly, I’m guessing most people aren’t familiar with the poem that film draws on, but that’s almost the point. The poem itself is pretty visionary and is a deep resource of imagery and meaning. However, much of that meaning is possibly not as directly important to the reader of today, but from Lowery’s approach, it isn’t too much of a stretch to say that the film can well inform the pleasure and interpretation of the poem.

It’s a different Gawain in the film, for sure. Younger, inexperienced, but driven by his desire to be that which he wants to be and possibly not just what he thinks he should be, his character is seen growing and maturing through the events and characters he encounters. In this crucial sense, he shares with the Gawain poet’s version a similar trajectory. Both men discover where they fall short. Interestingly, though, the film’s Gawain is far more accepting of his fate. 

He removes the green belt from his armor before announcing he’s ready for the Green Knight’s blow.

Afterword

Andrew Droz Palermo’s cinematographer is exquisite. I really need to do a special feature on directors and their DPs. It goes without saying that film is a collaborative medium, but in one where the auteur sensibility still permeates, it’s important to check that the helmer’s vision doesn’t work without a team that gets what the distinct vision for each movie is. From the lensman to the editor to the composer (and of course, the cast), if any of these is out of whack, the film suffers accordingly. When they’re all in place, magic can happen.

I haven’t given much wordage to the other performers. Aside from Dev Patel’s Gawain, the most realized characters are Joel Edgerton’s Lord and Vikander’s Essel and her turn as Edgerton’s wife. That said, Choudhury’s Morgana leaves a deep impression of whose command of the ancient ways runs deep. Sean Harris’s Arthur is sketched out well enough to give some idea of who he is, but in general, this is Patel’s movie.

Notes

1. In the cast listings, Sean Harris is listed as “the King”, Alice Dickie as “the Queen”, Sarita Choudhury as “Mother”; I hope I’m not forcing interpretations here, but I find it easier to keep track of the story in my mind if the names are restored to the respective characters. Now having said that, it occurs to me that it would make sense if the reason the cast is so listed is to support Lowery’r distinct authorial voice here. 

2. Raffel, Burton. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. New American Library. New York. 1970. 

A parting shot: Gawain on his quest