“Is this all there is?”
“What else could there be?”
I’m paraphrasing, and I probably got the lines wrong, but that’s an exchange in The Green Knight that stuck in the back of my mind, and still hums around in this noggin of mine now 24 hours after having seen it. David Lowery is a filmmaker with big existential questions on his mind, or at least has been in his three most recent features, with everything seemingly coming back to one’s inevitable end.
With The Green Knight, his adaptation of the ancient poem “Sir Gawain and The Green Knight”, Lowery is doing double duty, supplying the story with its required textual theme (or run the risk of just telling a completely different tale altogether) as well as a subtext of Lowery’s own making that is far more haunting. For those familiar with the story of Sir Gawain, the broad strokes will largely be familiar. Gawain (Dev Patel), King Arthur’s (Sean Harris) nephew accepts a challenge offered by the titular knight (Ralph Ineson): strike me however you wish, but in one year you must return to me so I can offer you the same blow in kind. Gawain decapitates the immortal knight who immediately rises to his feet, and leaves holding Gawain to his promise of “one year!”
When the appropriate time comes, our “not yet Sir” Gawain sets on a cross country journey through dangers both rooted in the real-world, as well as the spectral, and even those that may very well be tricks of his mind…or not. Far be it from me to ruin the fun that Lowery and his team have devised, but the film’s episodic approach provides sense of scale and worldbuilding that gives way to a feeling that almost anything could be around the corner. And as it turns out, there’s little to dissuade that notion.
That the poem has a ton of space to riff between the key points of Gawain setting off and his arrival at the castle is something that Lowery takes full advantage of, postulating a set of challenges for the hero that are fully of his own creation but also well in keeping with the poem’s central theme of overcoming cowardice and growing into a heroic ideal. Of course, this is still a David Lowery film, so it goes without saying that its a far slower, more meditative journey than many might expect with their fantasy epics. Whereas his last film, The Old Man and the Gun, was a throwback to 70’s caper films and fairly antithetical to his general pacing dynamic, The Green Knight feels more akin to his master A Ghost Story and in a key way, approaches it as a counterweight.
Allow me to explain. A Ghost Story is predicated on the experience beyond death. A sense of timelessness permeates throughout as its ghost, while planted in the same place, experiences the shifting sands of time around him. In that world, death transcends chronology. While in The Green Knight, a title Lowery takes literally, turning its title character into a literal embodiment of the forest, death is the eventuality and we’re trying to escape it for as long as we can.
The green in the title isn’t just representative of the foliage that surrounds the Knight in question. It is also a reference to the rot and decay that covers our physical forms when we inevitably depart the mortal coil. The cynical response to A Ghost Story’s somewhat optimistic eye toward eternity, or a more hopeful read might dictate that it simply addresses the body, while the earlier film addresses the spirit. Regardless, both films feel like necessary, and masterful responses to one another.
But this is all added value, at the forefront of The Green Knight’s pleasures is that its simply an imaginative and hypnotic journey through Arthurian legend. With fantasy filmmaking on such a wain in the post-Lord of the Rings era, and what quality within the genre being left to longform efforts on television, it’s thrilling to see one of the form’s most exciting talents ply his trade within its confines and produce the kind of excellence we haven’t witnessed in a very long time.