Quickie Reviews

 "The Green Knight" is very disappointing.  The acting is fine, but the director clearly didn't trust his source material, and wanted to "emulate" (read:  reference like a college student) every film of importance to his childhood he could.  (I saw it at Alamo Drafthouse, my favorite theater.  They ran an interview with the director where he ran down his five favorite films that influenced this one.  The "anxiety of influence" was so plainly on the screen it became painful; as well as tedious.).  I have no problem with movies that "modernize" old stories, rather than try to tell them as if we were a 14th century audience listening to a poet recite a tale.

But that's not the flaw here.  Lots of symbolism, foreshadowing, leitmotifs (mostly visual ones, like fire.) The opening scene shows a Python-esque medieval English landscape, where a roof in the near distance catches fire (something finally happens, in other words).  Fire appears again and again, mostly signalling magic, not hearth, home, warmth, or comfort.  You get the idea. The director puts his intentions on the screen like a rabid creative writing student convinced of his cleverness.

Gawain (pronounced variably "Gah-win" or "Gar-win" and once "Gah-wane") is recast as not yet a knight who takes the challenge of the beheading game and then, like a recalcitrant adolescent, sets out in quest of the Green Chapel a year later.  It's a coming-of-age story, in other words; a rite of passage tale, neither of which the original is.  But arguably it fits the theme of the original, so close enough is good enough.  As I said, updating is allowed, we're 7 centuries on from the original.

But then the journey which happens almost off-stage in the poem, becomes a central (and confusing) part of the movie.  The director praised one of his five movies in the interview for setting its own pace and patiently following it ("The Dark Crystal," IIRC; he also praised that for having puppets.  "Green Knight" has puppets, though their exact narrative purpose seems to be just to delay Gawain setting out for the Green Chapel.  We could have done without them; instead, we get them three times almost in a row.).  The journey involves a magical fox (why?), and Morgan La Fey is no longer the hand behind the Knight (or the enchantments) but instead it’s: Gawain's mother?  Who is doing it because her son needs to become a man?  Maybe.  Or maybe the Green Knight is now some sentient force of nature?

Precious little is explained, which as I say shows no trust in the source material, which explains everything both neatly and eloquently in the final stanzas.  This movie doesn't.  Instead we get a "Bobby in the shower" scene and the Knight cheerily offering to lop off Gawain's head.

Which is a much worse ending than the Beheading Game trope calls for.  Oh, and you're not sure if he means it (but the movie indicates that, probably, he does), because that's the last thing you see on screen:  the Knight uttering those words.  Which leaves you, as my Lovely Wife said, thinking:  "That's it?"  Yes, the whole point of the greatest bar bet in literary history is:  you cut off my head, now I cut off yours.  Which isn't a bar bet after all; it's just a cheap trick. You know the minute Gawain beheads the Green Knight that it didn’t work the way Gawain expected. But if the end of the long journey of the narrative is simply”Now I kill you, sucker!,” well, what was the point of sitting through the story?

The whole point of "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" is in the scene at the Green Chapel, and the lesson Gawain takes back to Camelot with him.  The whole point, in other words, is what the beheading game leads to. Here it leads nowhere. But we were forewarned in the opening of the movie that this story is not the story of the familiar king who pulled sword from stone.  It is not, in other words, the chivalric romance it calls it’s source material. Fair enough; but then, what is it?

Arthur is wise here, but old.  Gawain is not wise and doesn't seem to grow old, just ages into incompetence and immaturity in a sequence that is as false as narrative can be.  What the director did was take the basic story from the poem and then decide "Nobody'll understand that!"  What nobody can understand is the story he presented.  The 700 year old poem, thankfully, is still available to us.

(I've now read some reviews available on-line.  Mostly they pontificate about the original poem, trying to show off their knowledge of medieval English poetry but lacking the chops.  I suspected most of the audience in the theater with me were English majors (who else would be interested on an early Saturday afternoon?).  The few reviews I've read indicate the authors know nothing about the poem, but want to warily admit it's "complicated."  It is, but this movie isn't.  Which is the problem, as I said.)