The Green Knight: Dev Patel Delivers a Thinking-Person's Version of a Conflicted Medieval Hero
By Karen Gordon
Rating: B-plus
Long before Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings or contemporary superheroes, myriad cultures turned to mythic warriors and knights on quests that put them through trials that made them dance on the edge of life and death.
Warriors belong to a fraternity, adhere to a moral code, and fight against villains and monsters who push them to their physical and sometimes moral limits.
Myths make for great action movies, built for excitement, with special effects and loud music scores, attractive heroes in jeopardy, adding up to a major sensory experience, like getting on a ride at a fair. Lots of fun, but they don’t always require viewers to do much deep thinking.
Dev Patel plays a complicated Sir Gawain in The Green Knight.
Writer/director David Lowery has taken the polar opposite approach to the classic hero’s journey, with The Green Knight. By going to the source of its mythic essence to bring out something more complex, he presents us with a film that is more of an allegory than an action film.
The Green Knight is based on a 14th century romantic poem, a riff on one of King Arthur’s knights, by an anonymous Welsh writer. The poem - the story of a challenge taken up by a young knight - has endured for centuries influencing philosophers and storytellers. No less a figure than J.R.R. Tolkien did an English translation.
The story centers on a soon-to-be knight, Gawain, played by Dev Patel, young, insecure about himself and his place in the world, who loses himself in pleasures and drink, and worries about whether he has the mettle to be a knight. It’s Christmas-time and Gawain goes to a dinner thrown by the King, (Sean Harris). The King asks him to sit next to him and the Queen (Kate Dickie) on their dais, but Gawain hesitates. He feels unworthy.
The dinner is interrupted by the arrival of The Green Knight, (Ralph Ineson) who rides into the midst of things on his horse, and lays down a challenge in the form of a game. The Knight is awe inspiring, a relative giant, who looks like he’s half man, and half tree.
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Who, he asks, will fight him either to best him or to the death? And there’s a second part to the game: If the knight is victorious then, in a year, they must agree to ride out to the forest and find the Green Chapel. There, the Green Knight will finish the game by inflicting the same wound on the knight.
The knights are silenced by this challenge, but Gawain, accepts and relatively easily, chops off the Green Knight’s head. While he’s claiming victory. the Green Knight, comes to life, picks up his head, reminds Gawain that they’ll meet again in a year. He gives Gawain his giant axe as a trophy, and then rides out.
For a year, Gawain is a local celebrity. When the time comes, he gears up, in knight’s armour gets on his similarly decked out horse, grabs the Green Knight’s axe, and rides out to the forest to fulfill his part of the bargain, and, in effect, to accept his fate.
The road to the Green Chapel is through the forest, and Gawain runs into a series of challenges, thieves who rob him of everything but his underwear, ghosts, a strange Lord (Joel Edgerton) and Lady (Alicia Vikander) who give him a beautiful comfortable respite, but not necessarily a comforting experience. It’s set back after set back on the road to his fateful meeting with the Green Knight.
All that said, why the hell would Gawain bother to go knowing what awaits him?
We are in allegory territory here, and there is a lot more going on than what’s on the screen. The story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is filled with symbolism, starting with the juxtaposition of pagan ideas and beliefs with Christian ones. The Green Knight, a creature built of the forest, shows up at the Christian holiday of Christmas. Christmas is set around the winter equinox, an event of pagan tradition symbolizing the changing of the seasons and the symbolism of death, through the cold months, leading ultimately to rebirth.
The story also deals with masculine and feminine principle. Gawain’s mother (Sarita Choudhury) is, secretly, a powerful sorceress. Alicia Vikander plays two different women in the film, one who loves him, and one who tempts him.
This is deeply mythical material: Gawain’s journey, with its trials and set-backs is an ages-old example of the classic hero’s journey. Psychologically it a symbolic version of the journey towards individuation, which has influenced the minds of Christian mystics, Carl Jung, Tolkien and George Lucas.
Lowery has taken on heady stuff here. Stripped to its essence it may be. But it’s complex enough to be open to interpretation. And in bringing it to the screen, he’s conceded little to what modern audiences expect from their medieval adventures.
Lowery has made a beautiful looking movie, and given it a measured stately pace, as if he cut the entire film to the timing of a metronome set at its slowest pace. Gawain wanders through a wild and forested area that is so quiet and viscerally presented that you can almost smell the moss and greenery. There are things mortal and magic here, and he presents it to us as Gawain experiences it.
He’s also eliminated a lot of the details of the original story. For instance, the King, only known as King, is, King Arthur in the original tale. The Queen is Guinevere. Gawain is Arthur’s nephew. But Lowery has performed an Arthur-ectomy so that the focus is on Gawain.
Patel clearly grasps the contradictions in the character and carries the dilemmas beautifully. Patel is a charismatic screen presence, physically tall, intelligent, and impressive. You can believe he’s a knight.
But the film isn’t about his prowess. This is a story about his essence. And Patel is an internal and thoughtful actor. One of his strengths is how he can show conflicting emotions, simultaneously, joy and fear for instance.
Here, that’s essential, revealing more about the character than the character himself knows. Gawain hesitates, and struggles to figure out what’s happening. His morality is tested in small ways, suggesting he’s not yet the man he could be.
There are flaws here. The story is at times, a bit obscure, and it feels that Lowery sometimes overreaches. It’s deep material. A movie version of an allegory or a myth, works on two levels - what we see, and how it affects us unconsciously. At times, that connection eludes the story.
Are audiences, who are used to having their heroic stories delivered to them in fantastically exciting packages, ready for this reined-in version of the wounded hero? In spite of its flaws, Lowery’s The Green Knight makes a case for a different sort of hero whose time may have come.
The Green Knight. Written and directed by David Lowery. Starring Dev Patel, Alicia Vikander, Sarita Choudhury, Joel Edgerton and Ralph Ineson. The Green Knight opens in theatres on July 30, 2021