The Green Knight Review (Patreon)

Well, shit. Movie theaters are open again. Until a few hours ago I hadn't stepped foot in one since January of 2020. Half of tonight's novelty was sitting among other people in a big dark room watching movies above a 1080p resolution again. It's like walking through a desolated medieval Britain and then meeting a... oh yeah, I watched The Green Knight this evening.

All post-total-lockdown novelty aside, The Green Knight is pretty brilliant. It channels the weirdest and best of its Arthurian source material with an extra helping of weirdness on top. Its sense of physical space and geography shines while holding them accountable to the metaphysical quest narrative at its heart, costuming and characters are colorful and garish (as was medieval Britain), and The Green Knight's willingness to be weird and surprising allows for maximum oddness and fluidity. Dev Patel grants failnephew Gawain endearing psychological messiness, rendering him a mass of neuroses and anxiety as he stumbles through his metaphysical quest, the one bastion of emotional reality amid figures embodying cosmic forces beyond Gawain's ability to wholly understand or humbly bow to. Its use of the quest narrative as a psychological portrait is not new, of course, but the degree to which David Lowery and Patel emphasize it grants a rawness and endearing patheticness to the Arthurian myth that I can't recall having seen outside of Boorman's Excalibur (except Lowery's take is more defined by psychological awe than Boorman's willfully decadent prurience).

There's an underlying cynicism to the affair though. The sense that Gawain can't fulfill his quest because of his personality flaws makes this mean-spirited in spots, if no more so than the source material can be (and indeed, Patel's grounding of the character in his own terror benefits the movie greatly in this regard). The comparisons to Monty Python and the Holy Grail are quite right for multiple reasons -- Lowery has pointed out Holy Grail's genuinely well-done costuming, which The Green Knight dutifully emulates while not looking quite like anything else, and Gawain's fear of combat and ladies is very Holy Grail (though really, a lot of that is Python actually having a pretty good understanding of Arthurian myth). There's a sequence near the end that spoilers emulates The Last Temptation of Christ to a startling degree spoilers end which nearly tips the film into total cynicism, but then saves itself at the last moment. It works on the whole, but there are moments that evoke a fear the whole thing is about to collapse.

But such fears are part and parcel of The Green Knight's joys. It's a visually and aesthetically distinctive vision of myth, race, and masculinity in medieval Britain whose rival on film may not exist. It's as powerful and fun to watch as Boorman's Excalibur, and much better written to boot (to be clear, I fucking love Excalibur). There's even some (admittedly very, very tame) queer flavoring if you like "my spouse and I saw thee from across the tavern and we doth like thy vibes" queers, and there are even cute aminals in it. This is a movie that dares to look at a work Tolkien translated and boasts "I can do this just as well as you." If I see a better movie this year, I'll be surprised.