Grappling with The Green Knight (2021)
Alex
This was a medieval folk tale pitched to the public as an arthouse film, from the mecca of millennial arthouse films, A24.
Directors don’t often realize just how difficult it is to create a successful story outside of genre. Your film’s genre provides a guiding star for thousands of daily decisions, on set and in the editing room. A horror film has a given feel, which requires certain lighting; it has a certain character arc, which provides certain goals to reach within the plot. An action film with plenty of CG comes with thousands of your aesthetic decisions already made for you.
A film outside of genre (any arthouse film) has no such ready-made decisions. Every single facet of every single frame is up for re-interpretation. Every single scene is another mountain of very small decisions that have to be navigated very intentionally by the director and the editor, lest you lose that magical groove. Genre films have established a standard of what that groove is meant to feel like. An arthouse film must establish its own unique groove. Not one of these thousand decisions have been made before, because this film, by definition, has no precedent. Victor Wooten stated that people feel music before they hear it. This principle applies to film as well. When there is no clear and central vision, even a film that’s beautiful on its surface becomes a tiring slog for the audience.
Jade
An opening title card of The Green Knight introduces the story as a “Chivalric Romance”. Today, few people know precisely what that means. The most a modern person has to say about chivalry is that it’s dead. In the medieval era though, chivalry as a code of conduct emphasizing honor and nobility was central to the ruling class. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales begin with a Chivalric Romance related by the Knight. He tells of two knights in love with the same woman, and their efforts to win her heart, demonstrating values of loyalty and honor. The Knight’s Tale is followed by the Miller's tale, when the Miller drunkenly attempts to one-up the Knight’s story. The Miller’s tale by contrast is a story of peasants fighting over the same woman and the one character who believes passionately in chivalric romance, courtly love, loyalty and honor– this character becomes the butt of every joke, the laughing stock of the entire story.
While Tolkien holds up the tale of Sir Gawain and The Green Knight as one of the greatest Arthurian tales demonstrating an archetypal chivalric romance, it is as if Director David Lowery has butted in belligerently and, much like the Miller, made a laughing stock of chivalry itself. Lowery cares little for medieval context and culture, and spends so much of his creative work on the project of “modernizing” that, in lieu of any other artistic decision, the film focuses instead on mere shells that look an awful lot like a frat bro or an angry feminist, while the moments that should feel truly remarkable and adventurous fall flat upon a yawning audience.