The Green Knight (2021): Movie Review
Feb. 16th, 2024 06:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
labingiVirtually all the commentary I see on this film says it’s amazing, and I agree it is in many ways, but I was frustrated by it more than I liked it. In the face of so many rave reviews, I want to talk about why. For context, I am a fan of the poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I’ve read it twice, I love it dearly, but I am by no means an expert on it, and I haven’t read it in quite a while. Nutshell: I think this movie used gorgeous aesthetics to tell a story far inferior (in all but one way) to the poem’s.
First some things this film executes perfectly: almost everything that has to do with the senses: the cinematography, the color scheme (which is almost a character itself), the music, the costumes. I did not love the CGI fox, but that’s probably just my anti-CGI bias. I am glad they went with practical effects for the Green Knight. Also points for capturing a real sense of late Roman Arthurian Britain: the bigness, the danger, the “wastelands,” the cold stone, the bad teeth, rapid aging (Arthur as Gawain’s uncle is probably only about forty, but he convincingly looks utterly exhausted and on the way out). I also think there’s a good balance of magic and gritty reality.
The acting and directing are universally excellent, and the dialogue is very well written on the level of diction: it does a nice job of sounding both archaic and casual-modern, giving a sense of culturally different people being their everyday selves—and I’m a tough critic in this area. The whole speech about “green” is wonderful. It also does good “representation...”
(spoilers for poem and movie below the cut)
Representation Points: (I’m a tough critic in this area too). I like how they avoid casting the elevated RP accent as “noble.” The overall effect is that people have lots of different accents from lots of different upbringings, which seems plausible and aware of language equity in a good, in-context way. Similarly, with regard to race, casting Gawain and his mother as darker-than-typically European successfully centers people who read to us a non-white in a plausible way for Celtic Britain: it has a history of darker peoples (even today, see folks like Catherine Zeta-Jones) and likely had more back before centuries of invasions by Danes, Saxons, Normans, etc. (Sidebar: I sense almost as much influence in this film from The Mists of Avalon as Gawain and the Green Knight.)
There’s also one story element where I think the movie exceeds the poem. The poem mentions at the end that Morgan le Fey is responsible for the game, with little elaboration. The movie translates this to Gawain’s mother being responsible for it. She isn’t named, but typically she would be Morgause, Morgan and Arthur’s sister and a similarly witchy woman. In the film, she has a clear reason for doing this: her son is a screw-up and she wants to put him through a challenge to grow him up. That’s a nice, plausible, feminist lens, and it elevates the feminist cred of a story that, for the 1400s, is already pretty good to its female characters.
So why did I finish the movie feeling disappointed?
I think it has two storytelling problems: 1) not understanding (or maybe not caring about) the original theme, which is a brilliant, rare theme, and 2) in a nuts-and-bolts way, not having a proper character arc.
1) Squandering the theme. Here’s a sketch of the poem as I recall it (details may be off). The Green Knight pops over to Camelot at Christmas, and, as a game, challenges knight to strike him if knight is willing to receive the same strike from him next year. Gawain, a noble night, takes up the challenge, beheads him, thinking that’s that, but the Green Knight picks up his head and rides off.
Gawain dutifully goes off next winter to find Knight at the Green Chapel. Along the way, he finds hospitality at the home of a red knight dude and his wife. They also play a game, where the red knight will give Gawain whatever he hunts during the day (for three days?) if Gawain gives him what he received that day at the knight’s castle. This kind of works, with Gawain mostly fighting off the advances of the red knight’s wife and, when he can’t, giving what he received (ex. a kiss). But then the wife gives him a green girdle, which she says will protect him from death. He doesn’t want to die at the Green Knight’s hands, so he keeps this girdle for himself.
Off he rides to the Green Knight and after a couple false starts, the knight nicks him on the neck and explains this was all a test (by Morgan) and that the nick for his failure of perfect knightly virtue in hiding the girdle. (Green and red knights are the same guy.) Gawain returns home, now wearing the green sash as a token reminder of his imperfection. Camelot then takes green sash wearing up as fashionable.
The theme is no one’s perfect, and even those of us who (rightly) see ourselves as virtuous and honorable have moments where our virtue will fail. The story is a lighthearted invitation to learn this, admit it but without self-flagellation, to learn to own our failings with humility but not undue shame. That’s a difficult, nuanced truth, rarely expressed in narrative and rarely expressed so well.
For reference, it’s well known that Tolkien was fond of this story, so much so he translated it from the original Middle English. And thematically there’s a lot of this story in The Lord of the Rings. Frodo is a kind of Gawain figure (in a much graver context) and his green sash is the loss of his finger.
vs. the movie...
In the movie, Gawain is a womanizing, drunken wastrel who’s never done anything knight-worthy in his life, so his mother sends him on a journey to make him shape up. The main events are similar, with a lot of additional adventures along the way (well rendered in themselves). In the end, after balking at the Green Knight’s blows (as in the poem), he balks utterly, it seems, and runs away—all the way back to Camelot, where, in what is obviously a “what if” scenario, he lives a whole life, becoming king, etc. but plagued by an underlying sense of dishonor that leads to broken relationships, conflict, war, sadness, loneliness, etc. Of course, this is all in his mind, and back with the Green Knight, he thinks better of it all, takes off the defense of the girdle and offers himself to the blow. He gets nicked because it’s all a game, and that’s that.
The theme here, as I understand it, is that an immature, self-centered, but not inherently bad, F-up needs to grow up.
This is not a rarely explored, nuanced, deep human truth. This is one of the most basic, common themes in (at least modern) narrative. It’s everyone from Tony Stark to Sydney Carton. It’s Han Solo coming back to help blow up the Death Star. It’s Mad Mardigan in Willow (I’m not going to look up if I spelled his name right). It’s the guy in that Twilight Zone episode who deserted as a WWI soldier and then had to relive those events and die to save future war hero’s life. It’s not that this is necessarily a bad story. It’s that it’s obvious and a cliché. And when your source material is one of the truly exceptional stories that makes you stare into your own heart, and you want to jettison that in favor of telling us that screw-ups should shape up, cowards should become braver, the selfish should learn to help others, I’m going to counsel against that downgrade.
2) Story structure. An effective character arc happens over the course of a story. In this movie, Gawain’s didn’t. Individual vignettes were good. (St. Winifred could have been a lovely short film on its own.) But despite some ebb and flow in Gawain’s moment-to-moment behavior, Selfish, Cowardly Screw-up was basically Selfish, Cowardly Screw-up right up to the Green Chapel. His entire arc happened in the last few minutes of the film in a “dream sequence” in his head. The film is beautiful, but that’s not good story structure.
I do like the frame with his mother, though, and if I could recommend the best of both worlds, I recommend this:
Start as the movie starts. Gawain is a screw-up. His mom’s going to make him grow up. Use his “side adventures” (getting robbed, Winifred, fox, etc.) to really show him change so that by the time he arrives at the castle, he is basically where poem-Gawain started, a proper, courteous, honorable knight. Then proceed with the poem’s narrative, more or less as written in the poem.
(I almost wonder if the film could be re-edited to create an arc. Cut the dream sequence, cut parts that show Gawain morally backsliding after moments of growth, except for hiding the girdle, of course. I think that might mostly work.)
I do recommend the film to fans of Arthuriana, and I do look forward to more from this creative team. There’s a lot of talent there.
First some things this film executes perfectly: almost everything that has to do with the senses: the cinematography, the color scheme (which is almost a character itself), the music, the costumes. I did not love the CGI fox, but that’s probably just my anti-CGI bias. I am glad they went with practical effects for the Green Knight. Also points for capturing a real sense of late Roman Arthurian Britain: the bigness, the danger, the “wastelands,” the cold stone, the bad teeth, rapid aging (Arthur as Gawain’s uncle is probably only about forty, but he convincingly looks utterly exhausted and on the way out). I also think there’s a good balance of magic and gritty reality.
The acting and directing are universally excellent, and the dialogue is very well written on the level of diction: it does a nice job of sounding both archaic and casual-modern, giving a sense of culturally different people being their everyday selves—and I’m a tough critic in this area. The whole speech about “green” is wonderful. It also does good “representation...”
(spoilers for poem and movie below the cut)
Representation Points: (I’m a tough critic in this area too). I like how they avoid casting the elevated RP accent as “noble.” The overall effect is that people have lots of different accents from lots of different upbringings, which seems plausible and aware of language equity in a good, in-context way. Similarly, with regard to race, casting Gawain and his mother as darker-than-typically European successfully centers people who read to us a non-white in a plausible way for Celtic Britain: it has a history of darker peoples (even today, see folks like Catherine Zeta-Jones) and likely had more back before centuries of invasions by Danes, Saxons, Normans, etc. (Sidebar: I sense almost as much influence in this film from The Mists of Avalon as Gawain and the Green Knight.)
There’s also one story element where I think the movie exceeds the poem. The poem mentions at the end that Morgan le Fey is responsible for the game, with little elaboration. The movie translates this to Gawain’s mother being responsible for it. She isn’t named, but typically she would be Morgause, Morgan and Arthur’s sister and a similarly witchy woman. In the film, she has a clear reason for doing this: her son is a screw-up and she wants to put him through a challenge to grow him up. That’s a nice, plausible, feminist lens, and it elevates the feminist cred of a story that, for the 1400s, is already pretty good to its female characters.
So why did I finish the movie feeling disappointed?
I think it has two storytelling problems: 1) not understanding (or maybe not caring about) the original theme, which is a brilliant, rare theme, and 2) in a nuts-and-bolts way, not having a proper character arc.
1) Squandering the theme. Here’s a sketch of the poem as I recall it (details may be off). The Green Knight pops over to Camelot at Christmas, and, as a game, challenges knight to strike him if knight is willing to receive the same strike from him next year. Gawain, a noble night, takes up the challenge, beheads him, thinking that’s that, but the Green Knight picks up his head and rides off.
Gawain dutifully goes off next winter to find Knight at the Green Chapel. Along the way, he finds hospitality at the home of a red knight dude and his wife. They also play a game, where the red knight will give Gawain whatever he hunts during the day (for three days?) if Gawain gives him what he received that day at the knight’s castle. This kind of works, with Gawain mostly fighting off the advances of the red knight’s wife and, when he can’t, giving what he received (ex. a kiss). But then the wife gives him a green girdle, which she says will protect him from death. He doesn’t want to die at the Green Knight’s hands, so he keeps this girdle for himself.
Off he rides to the Green Knight and after a couple false starts, the knight nicks him on the neck and explains this was all a test (by Morgan) and that the nick for his failure of perfect knightly virtue in hiding the girdle. (Green and red knights are the same guy.) Gawain returns home, now wearing the green sash as a token reminder of his imperfection. Camelot then takes green sash wearing up as fashionable.
The theme is no one’s perfect, and even those of us who (rightly) see ourselves as virtuous and honorable have moments where our virtue will fail. The story is a lighthearted invitation to learn this, admit it but without self-flagellation, to learn to own our failings with humility but not undue shame. That’s a difficult, nuanced truth, rarely expressed in narrative and rarely expressed so well.
For reference, it’s well known that Tolkien was fond of this story, so much so he translated it from the original Middle English. And thematically there’s a lot of this story in The Lord of the Rings. Frodo is a kind of Gawain figure (in a much graver context) and his green sash is the loss of his finger.
vs. the movie...
In the movie, Gawain is a womanizing, drunken wastrel who’s never done anything knight-worthy in his life, so his mother sends him on a journey to make him shape up. The main events are similar, with a lot of additional adventures along the way (well rendered in themselves). In the end, after balking at the Green Knight’s blows (as in the poem), he balks utterly, it seems, and runs away—all the way back to Camelot, where, in what is obviously a “what if” scenario, he lives a whole life, becoming king, etc. but plagued by an underlying sense of dishonor that leads to broken relationships, conflict, war, sadness, loneliness, etc. Of course, this is all in his mind, and back with the Green Knight, he thinks better of it all, takes off the defense of the girdle and offers himself to the blow. He gets nicked because it’s all a game, and that’s that.
The theme here, as I understand it, is that an immature, self-centered, but not inherently bad, F-up needs to grow up.
This is not a rarely explored, nuanced, deep human truth. This is one of the most basic, common themes in (at least modern) narrative. It’s everyone from Tony Stark to Sydney Carton. It’s Han Solo coming back to help blow up the Death Star. It’s Mad Mardigan in Willow (I’m not going to look up if I spelled his name right). It’s the guy in that Twilight Zone episode who deserted as a WWI soldier and then had to relive those events and die to save future war hero’s life. It’s not that this is necessarily a bad story. It’s that it’s obvious and a cliché. And when your source material is one of the truly exceptional stories that makes you stare into your own heart, and you want to jettison that in favor of telling us that screw-ups should shape up, cowards should become braver, the selfish should learn to help others, I’m going to counsel against that downgrade.
2) Story structure. An effective character arc happens over the course of a story. In this movie, Gawain’s didn’t. Individual vignettes were good. (St. Winifred could have been a lovely short film on its own.) But despite some ebb and flow in Gawain’s moment-to-moment behavior, Selfish, Cowardly Screw-up was basically Selfish, Cowardly Screw-up right up to the Green Chapel. His entire arc happened in the last few minutes of the film in a “dream sequence” in his head. The film is beautiful, but that’s not good story structure.
I do like the frame with his mother, though, and if I could recommend the best of both worlds, I recommend this:
Start as the movie starts. Gawain is a screw-up. His mom’s going to make him grow up. Use his “side adventures” (getting robbed, Winifred, fox, etc.) to really show him change so that by the time he arrives at the castle, he is basically where poem-Gawain started, a proper, courteous, honorable knight. Then proceed with the poem’s narrative, more or less as written in the poem.
(I almost wonder if the film could be re-edited to create an arc. Cut the dream sequence, cut parts that show Gawain morally backsliding after moments of growth, except for hiding the girdle, of course. I think that might mostly work.)
I do recommend the film to fans of Arthuriana, and I do look forward to more from this creative team. There’s a lot of talent there.
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Date: 2024-02-17 07:55 am (UTC)no subject
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