Worth the risk
GO AHEAD, TAKE A CHANCE — SEE A WEIRD-LOOKING MOVIE LIKE THE GREEN KNIGHT OR PIG
To say audiences have had a mixed reaction to The Green Knight, director David Lowery’s retelling of a 14th-century Arthurian chivalric romance, is a bit of an understatement. On reviews aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, only 53 per cent of viewers rated it positively, and opening night moviegoers gave it a mere C+ in their conversations with Cinemascore pollsters.
That might be disappointing for the people who made The Green Knight. But this ambivalence is a rare sign of health for the pandemic-battered movie industry. In an era dominated by blandly competent franchises, work that surprises, befuddles and even offends serves as a reminder that art has the power to do more than anesthetize. Any evidence that audiences are willing to try those more daring movies, even if they might not like what they find, helps to keep movies more expansive and exciting.
As the pandemic has progressed, of course, going to the movies may have often felt like a gamble to safety-conscious fans — if their local theatres were even open at all. Going to a film or trying a new television show has always been a different kind of wager, even in the best of times. The audience stakes their time, rather than their health: The roll of the dice determines whether they’ll get a blast or a slog or something else entirely in return.
Some bets have more reliable returns than others. An animated movie from Pixar will generally be delightful, and sometimes very special. The latest entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe will deliver a predictable quota of quips and action beats. But in this respect, movies are like investment vehicles, with varying levels of attendant risk. If you’re inclined to go to Marvel movies in the first place, you’ll probably never feel like you’ve wasted your money. But you’ll never be rewarded with daring storytelling or a transcendent cinematic experience, either.
The Green Knight shows the potential artistic and emotional prize that moviegoers can win when they gamble on unknown quantities.
There’s no denying that The Green Knight is strange. This is a movie full of naked giantesses and talking foxes, beautiful women who insist their heads have gone missing from their bodies, and, oh yes, a massive, axe-wielding combatant made of animated wood and vines. Those arresting images and enigmatic sequences are part of why The Green Knight is wonderful. It’s a film that will invite several, careful viewings.
Beyond its visuals, The Green Knight is a story driven by a pre-modern understanding of the world, rather than by contemporary manners and mores.
Most of us would assume we’d overdone it on the eggnog if an enchanted tree wandered into our houses on Christmas. Gawain, King Arthur’s nephew and a young man acutely aware that he’s been drifting through life, accepts the creature’s challenge: to land a blow on him, and in one year’s time, accept the same stroke in return. Gawain’s subsequent adventures bring him into contact with people who behave bewilderingly even by the standards of 14th-century Europe, which are themselves barely comprehensible to contemporary audiences. The Green Knight, more than much contemporary science fiction, is an exercise in immersion in an alien mindset, and thus too in empathy.
Unlike the 2011 noir crime drama Drive, which prompted a lawsuit from aggrieved moviegoers who thought the trailers promised a Fast & Furious-style romp, The Green Knight never tried to conceal its weirdness. Those naked giantesses and that pseudo-ent are right there in the promos. Given how admirably forthright studio A24 is about the movie’s nature, it was encouraging to see it in a full theatre on opening night last week, and to see it make US$6.75 million at the box office in its opening weekend.
Maybe those ticket buyers regretted their wager, but at least they had the guts and curiosity to make it.
Moviegoers eager for something other than Disney’s latest attempt to turn an amusement-park ride into cinema have had another opportunity to place their bets in recent weeks, on the Nicolas Cage movie Pig.
That movie is more difficult to summarize than The Green Knight. Pig might best be described as a mashup of the John Wick movies, in which a recluse is drawn back into his old world after being deprived of an animal he loves; Pixar’s Ratatouille; and Benh Zeitlin’s bewitching post-hurricane Katrina climate change fable, Beasts of the Southern Wild. And even that juxtaposition wouldn’t capture how good Cage is in Pig, or how powerful and jarring the movie’s fundamental decency feels.
Films such as The Green Knight and Pig are endangered species in an environment where theatres are increasingly dominated by franchises and movies based on existing intellectual property. They’re also exactly the sorts of films that should be seen in a cinema, and not just because they are beautiful enough to deserve to be seen at scale. Pig and The Green Knight are movies you’ll want to turn to and discuss with someone as soon as they’re over, no matter whether you respond to them with delight or disgust.