ON SCREEN: ONE MARRIAGE, TWO REVIEWS
Greg Bruce and Zanna Gillespie watch The Green Knight
She saw
The Green Knight is a spooky medieval fantasy, one of my least favourite film genres, next to necrorealism and aquatic horror. It’s a dark film, literally and figuratively, with a foreboding soundtrack and an unpleasant number of disembodied heads.
The premise is that Gawain (Dev Patel) accepts a challenge from the mysterious Green Knight, who looks like the love child of an Avatar character and a tree. If Gawain manages to strike the creature, he must seek him out in exactly one year so the Green Knight can return the blow. Gawain beheads the Green Knight, who picks up his head and leaves, casually carrying it under his arm. The meeting a year hence, therefore, will involve his own beheading. And so unfolds his journey into manhood: will Gawain prove himself a gallant knight and what would it mean to do so?
Greg has a strict “no prior knowledge” policy when entering a film, which I find mildly irritating but, as we head into our 12th week locked down with three children, the possibility of doing pre-viewing research is completely off the table. Unfortunately, The Green Knight would’ve been a much more entertaining watch if I had read the source material and understood what the heck was going on. Without any understanding of the late 14th-century chivalric romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, on which David Lowery based his script, the film was a mysterious series of events that I knew meant something but I couldn’t tell you what.
Greg found it excruciatingly boring and spent the last half hour standing up in order to keep himself awake. It is slow at times. There are long periods without dialogue and it’s more than two hours long, but I was invested in Gawain’s quest even though I became frustrated by my own confusion. There are peculiarities in the film that aren’t immediately comprehensible
— Alicia Vikander plays both Gawain’s peasant lover in his village and a lady at a castle he stumbles upon on his voyage to the Green Chapel. Why?
If there was ever a genre of film for which a reviewer’s ignorance of the source text would enrage its fans, it’s medieval fantasy. And, to that small but mighty cohort,
I apologise. It is beautifully executed: visually lush, an appropriately sparse script, accomplished performances and a mysterious immersive world that I’ve come to learn is much simpler than I first thought. In my opinion, although certainly not Greg’s, those unfamiliar with the original poem should augment their experience of the film by doing a little light reading first.
He saw
We watched it on the eve of our ninth wedding anniversary. It was so, so boring. The only plausible reason I could see for someone pretending to have enjoyed it is because they don’t like agreeing with their spouse.
How it drags! Not long into the journey at the story’s centre we are shown a minute and a half of Dev Patel sitting astride a horse walking uneventfully down a track. Walking! No dialogue either. Sure, the scenery is nice and whatever, but let’s get serious now. And in case you think this might be a momentary change in pace for effect, no, you are wrong. Appropriately and tellingly, the movie opens with the main character sleeping. The Green Knight’s source material was written 600 years ago and storytellers have learned a lot since then about how to hold an audience’s attention, but this movie wilfully ignores all of it. There is something admirable about that in this era of creative paucity, of endless remakes, sequels and adaptations but, if the desires of the audience are going to be sacrificed for the creative whims of the film-maker, is it not possible for them to be sacrificed in ways that are at least interesting? I was somewhat puzzled by the movie’s badness, given that it had a score of roughly 80 per cent on leading review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes, but actually that makes perfect sense: The strongest predictor of a career in film reviewing is a childhood spent playing Dungeons and Dragons.
The next morning, the morning of our ninth wedding anniversary, Zanna and I got into a discussion about the importance of understanding the movie’s source material. She fretted about her lack of knowledge. She said: “We’re reviewing a film that has a deep literary history that I don’t understand.”
I said: “Deep literary history my ass. It’s a weird poem written 600 years ago by someone probably on drugs. It’s only survived because of a series of coincidences.” “Mmmm,” she said. “I don’t think so.” She brought up a podcast she’d listened to recently, in which the movie had been one of the topics under discussion. One of the hosts had a degree in medieval literature and the other had recently listened to the audiobook of the original poem for fun.
I suggested to her that these people were not representative of the likely audience and that prior knowledge of an obscure medieval story could not be assumed by any modern filmmaker hoping for an audience. I probably had more points to make but Zanna’s tolerance for boredom had obviously declined precipitously overnight.
She said: “Please leave me alone. I’ve got so little time and so much to do.” There was a brief pause, then she added: “Happy anniversary.”
The Green Knight is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.