In essence, it’s about a fellowship with only one fellow (though he meets assorted specters and scoundrels along the way). But I saw how it added up, and I was glad to go with it. I was also, at moments, slightly baffled by it. Written and directed by the gifted maverick David Lowery (“A Ghost Story,” “The Old Man & the Gun,” “Pete’s Dragon”), it’s a somberly majestic medieval death trip with moments of true enchantment. As a movie, however, “The Green Knight” turns out to be accessible and engaging. I wasn’t exactly the world’s prize English major - but then, one reason I chose to watch movies instead is that the theological arcana of mystic medieval poetry didn’t exactly float my boat. I still recall trying to read “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” for a college literature class, and getting through about four pages of it.
#Green knight full#
If “The Lord of the Rings” undergirds “Star Wars,” and the King Arthur saga undergirds “The Lord of the Rings,” what are we to make of a misty, lavishly scaled medieval odyssey, full of ghosts and magic and hallucinations and wandering, that adapts - and does its best to stay true to - “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” an epic poem of tormented romantic nobility, with links to the Arthurian legends, written by an anonymous author in the late 14th century? As a movie, “The Green Knight” feels like it was scraped out of the deepest, muddiest archaeological sediment of the Age of Chivalry. But the tale of King Arthur still exerts a force on our imaginations, and Merlin, a character introduced in the 12th century, remains the Ur-wizard.Īll of which makes “ The Green Knight” a vital and fascinating artifact. There have, ironically, been almost no good movies made of the Arthurian legends (I’d say the best is Disney’s “The Sword in the Stone,” with “Excalibur” coming in a distant second - beyond that, the landscape is littered with high-flown Arthurian detritus like “First Knight,” “The Last Legion,” and “King Arthur: Legend of the Sword”). That certainly includes one myth that Tolkien drew upon in writing the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy: the saga of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Far from having been defeated, the Green Knight retains the advantage throughout the story, and the poet leaves him to go his ways, his mysteries unexplained and his ambiguities unresolved.One of the reasons the “Lord of the Rings” films became such a massive cultural phenomenon is that they were, in effect, the true prequels to “Star Wars.” (It didn’t matter that they unfolded in a more primitive world they took you over the hills and far away.) And movies, to this day, will happily go back to anything that can be linked to “Star Wars” DNA. However, when the story ends, Gawain and the Green Knight part as friends. The pattern of the romance leads to the expectation that the Green Knight is a villain, an evil monster. He has indeed been playing a game with Gawain, but a different game than the one Gawain imagined. When it finally becomes clear that he does not intend to kill Gawain, the Green Knight seems more mischievous than frightening. When Gawain meets the knight again at the Green Chapel, he is again fearsome, but also playful, tweaking Gawain by drawing out the final blow, alternately mocking him for cowardice and praising him for bravery. He says he comes to the court in peace, asking only for a game, and yet he carries a fearsome weapon, a huge axe. He is brash and rude in his challenge to the court, calling them mere children and telling them that if he had come to fight, no one could stand against him. He is enormously tall and strong, almost a giant, and his vigor and maturity are indicated by his bushy hair and beard. In other ways, however, he could simply be an especially bold knight. The Green Knight is not named in the poem, and he says only that men know him as the "Knight of the Green Chapel." His strange color and his marvelous ability to live without his head mark him as an otherworldly creature.
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