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Director: David Lowrey
Writer: David Lowrey
Stars: Dev Patel, Alicia Vikander, Sarita Choudhury, Sean Harris, Kate Dickie, Ralph Ineson, Barry Keoghan, Erin Kellyman, and Joel Edgerton.
Synopsis: A fantasy re-telling of the medieval story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
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It’s hard to believe in magic and to really lose yourself inside a film because we are so much savvier about technology. We carry supercomputers in our hands every day and, often smugly, can point out the seams of most computer-generated imagery. Yet, The Green Knight feels so much like magic. The film is an alchemy of rich myth and modern storytelling that mixes together and forms a unique cinematic experience.
If this film had been made as most myths and legends are adapted for the screen, there would have been much more. More violence, sex, clever retorts by a sidekick, and endless talking by everyone on screen whether it serves the plot or not. The myth wouldn’t have been able to breathe or embrace the fatalistic nature of the text. The Green Knight gives us a hero with fear, doubt, melancholy, and apprehension, stripping the swagger away for three dimensionality.
David Lowery finds those places within the myth to let his film breathe with sparse necessity before overwhelming pomp. The anticipation and agony of a setback is far more important and given greater weight here than in films like it. The anxiety we feel for our hero is a palpable object, a breath lodged in our throat. Lowrey, as editor, along with cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo build that tension within the depth and scope of the camera’s lens. The way the camera moves in intricate tracking shots, pans, wide vistas, and low angles that give a sense of scope and epic scale that never feels like a façade. The camera captures so much. It’s an intoxicating and a perfect point of view on this world that envelops us and brings us into it wholly.
Though, if Lowrey has one failing in the endeavor to tell The Green Knight, he lacks accessibility in all his imagery. Sir Gawain and The Green Knight is one of the, arguably, more accessible of the medieval Arthurian myths. It’s still not as widely known or allusory as many of the others. That’s no fault of the filmmakers, but in this case, they should have put more time into the more obscure adaptations from the text. As much as, the imagery of the braided, blindfolded, old woman is arresting and haunting, it would have been better with a small explanation why. Her movements and her presence are fascinating but completely cryptic. She and other “olde magicks,” leave a feeling in the back of the mind that that image should be obvious or known, but is impenetrable without the context. Yet, these small inaccessibilities never feel too dense to not enjoy the film.
This interpretation of the original text benefits greatly from the film’s modern visual style. The awesome special effects, the incredible locations, and the eerie, effective lighting that shifts in color and richness creates a mood that builds our understanding of this world. The Green Knight‘s immersive production design, sets, and costumes draw the eye to every corner of the screen and demand at least a second viewing to catch it all. The reason to adapt a text is to give a visual palette to what is only imagined by an author. Lowrey and his team’s interpretation is like a beautiful dream that supersedes the need to understand the full breadth of what a reader would at the time the text was written.
Though, none of that matters if the acting isn’t excellent and believable. The performances of the cast of The Green Knight are utterly brilliant. Especially, the purveyor of the best ASMR rasp in the biz, Sean Harris as the King. Yet, the most indelible performance is from Gawain himself, Dev Patel. Patel is an actor who, while excellent with words and timing, has a fabulously expressive face. One of the final sequences of the film is so haunting because it is nearly dialogue-free and features Patel running through a gamut of emotions. He smolders, broods, loves, ignores, seethes, and becomes resolute. It’s a performance that sheds the auspices of audience watching an actor and becomes a character in the body of the actor on screen.
The Green Knight is a cinema experience like few others. It is magic upon the screen. It’s an experience that will make you forget that it isn’t real. It takes you, all of you, for two hours and gives you back to the real world with a new sense of yearning to experience magic like it again. The power of film is on full display in The Green Knight.
