He traverses a deathly landscape in an episodic journey of symbolic encounters - a thief on a battlefield (Barry Keoghan) an apparition in a deserted house (Erin Kellyman) a kindly fox a comforting castle with a lord and a mystical companion (Joel Edgerton, Vikander again). Is he finally reaching maturity? Or is it a fool’s gambit to risk everything for Round Table infamy? “This is how silly men perish,” says Essel.īut Gawain, grimacing at the first sight of snowfall, sets out just the same to make his Christmas appointment with the Green Knight. Living with his mother, Morgana (Sarita Choudhury), Gawain is a little like a boy prince who doesn’t want to grow up.īut after King Arthur (Sean Harris) summons him to sit alongside his throne, Gawain haphazardly throws himself into the pursuit of honor, joining the Green Knight’s game. He and Essel (a marvelous, pixie-cut Alicia Vikander) are inseparable, in bed and at Mass. Gawain has none of the experience of Camelot’s more famous knights but that’s not causing him to loose any sleep. Lowery opens “The Green Knight” (which a24 opens in theaters Friday) with ornate titles crediting the tale’s historic origins - this is a story about stories - but immediately situates “The Green Knight” into a more natural realm and the intimate orbit of Patel’s Gawain. In King Arthur’s Round Table, Gawain is quite notable but he’s no Lancelot.īut in Patel’s brooding, uncontrived performance, Gawain is remarkably alive as a man - like Patel’s David Copperfield - figuring himself out. Only twice before has it been turned into a movie (both by British filmmaker Stephen Weeks, once with Sean Connery as the Green Knight, neither to any acclaim). Its lessons and meanings are somewhat inscrutable and much contested. A tale of chivalry and honor, it belongs to another, medieval world. Just making a movie out of this anonymous, alliterative poem is a wild kind of feat. But few American filmmakers of his generation have been quite as keen to pursue difficult philosophical questions or to stretch cinema in new, quixotic directions. The latter is a kind of companion piece to “The Green Knight,” and both, I think, sometimes use obliqueness to mask an inner vagueness. Lowery, the Texas filmmaker, has a propensity for lyrical legends ( “The Old Man and the Gun,” with Robert Redford ) and existential rumination ( “A Ghost Story” ). Gawain’s quest to visit the Green Knight a year later is a haunting journey into an inescapable abyss, a meditation on life and death made with the Green Knight’s axe looming. It’s both of the land and the ether, poised in a dreamy, mythical long ago. Lowery’s film, shot on misty Irish plains and dank forests, is earthy, with dirt under its nails, and blanketed in wintery fog. The Green Knight is the color of nature and of death, which here are the same things. The thrall of victory quickly turns ominous when the Green Knight stands, picks up his head and - with more menace than even an unwanted houseguest promising to return for the holidays - says he’ll see the young man next Christmas. Gawain, freshly inspired by King Arthur to be ambitious after spending his days drinking and carousing, takes up the challenge and boldly chops off the knight’s head.
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