David Lowery’s latest film, The Green Knight starring Dev Patel, is a loose adaptation of the epic poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a late 14th-century chivalric romance originally written in Middle English. One of the most well-known Arthurian legends, its original author is unknown and the text draws from many sources including Welsh, Irish, English, and French chivalric tradition. Lowery told Vanity Fair that in adapting the story he decided to lean into the history and mythology of Wales in particular. His take on the classic tale includes interpreting the Green Knight himself as a Green Man, a side story with St. Winifred’s Well, talking animals, and a peek at Cewri a.k.a. Welsh Giants.
Arthurian legends, Sir Gawain’s tale among them, find their roots in the myths of early Celtic Britons, whose traditions did not survive the invasion of the Roman Empire and the island’s subsequent conversion to Christianity. Druids passed many of these mythologies down orally. As such, they were not put into written form until the Middle Ages, just as the early Christian church in Wales was forming. The Celtic paganism is still clear in the early texts, though they were already transmuted through a Christian theological lens. (Read more.)
From The Dispatch:
The film’s central problem is that it is about a quest—traditionally an archetypal series of moral tests illustrating the search for wisdom—but Gawain’s experiences never seem to amount to much of anything. Indeed, whether the quest itself is worth pursuing is very much up for debate. "Why do you need greatness? Isn't goodness enough?" asks Gawain’s prostitute mistress, Essel (Alicia Vikander). A wise question, but one posed by a woman whose own character—both in personality and in virtue—is not clear. What does goodness mean to Essel? Presumably we’re supposed to fill in the blanks with our own ideas of goodness and greatness—and assume that the two are somehow inherently opposed. To seek greatness is inherently to disdain goodness.
This strikes me as a very modern, secular, and—trope-wise—female point of view that carries with it several unexamined assumptions. It’s not that this is a bad plot device, but it must be executed well. A a woman asking the hero to abandon his ambitious ways and commit to humble civilian life is a common trope in films critiquing honor culture.
The greatest treatments of the theme in American film are in classic Hollywood Westerns, which offer a valuable contrast to post-Christian myths like The Green Knight. (Indeed, in a sense the Western is the American Arthurian myth. Robert B. Pippin, paraphrasing “a German commentator,” writes, “the Greek had their Iliad; the Jews the Hebrews Bible; … the British the Arthurian legends. The Americans have John Ford.”)
The classic Western reveres the honorable man in the wilderness (while also being far more critical of the archetype than is commonly assumed—see The Gunfighter, The Big Country, The Searchers, etc.) It sees in him qualities of integrity and character, not simply a performative martyr complex.
This ethos could not clash more dramatically with modern mores. Many of the major on-screen stories of the last five years feature a beat where an ambitious male hero is humbled by a woman. Hamilton, The Greatest Showman, The Last Jedi, Minari, Enola Holmes, Loki, On the Rocks, Knives Out. I like and even love some of those stories, but the inherent badness of male ambition has become so axiomatic in modern storytelling that some films don’t even bother to explain why it is that this ambition is bad. In The Last Jedi, for instance, acts of derring-do by men are condemned while similar actions by women are lauded. The film never offers a plausible philosophy to distinguish between these actions. Similarly, The Green Knight shirks its responsibility to define terms.
John Ford’s Westerns offer an excellent contrast, clearly defining the terms and the values of the honor cultures they examine. In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Ford portrays a town ruled by a cruel tyrannous outlaw who can only be ousted by a dangerous man cut from the same cloth—spurred by an eastern lawyer bearing the virtues of truth and courage. Competence and virtue are both necessary to achieve peace, though the conclusion also hints that civilization and the post-honor world can only be brought about by betraying the honor code. In this complex web of characters, Ford intends us to love both the civilized man and the honorable, uncivilized gunfighter, for each has his virtues.
In many Westerns, men motivated by martial virtues of honor, heroism—the values required in a violent state of nature—must be domesticated by women, who value commitment, politesse—the virtues of civilization. This is essentially the story of The Green Knight (sort of—there’s also plenty of symbolism in the rather muddy film that presents femininity as wild uncivilized Paganism). But while Ford sees the dark side of honor culture, he also recognized that there is something admirable in acts of great courage and willpower, in the courageous self-definition of a brave man in the wild.
Green Knight director David Lowery doesn’t offer us anything like this nuanced reflection on honor and civilization. For him, pursuit of honor is simply hedonism. There is no conception that with achievement of honor could come self-respect or even salvation. Gawain speaks of honor, but what does honor mean to him? Keeping a promise? Yes, this, at least. But dimly we intuit that there must be more to the virtuous life than simply winding one's weary way to the doorstep of the grim reaper. Gawain does not start asking these questions until late in his plodding way.
The film’s treatment of Christianity is important in this calculus. “Christ is born” are the first words of the film, spoken in a brothel, a nest of hedonism and thoughtless lust. For Lowery, Christianity is simply shorthand for all that is safe and civilized and decadent. In an interview, Lowery said that Arthur is the only character to reference Christianity, and analogizes this to “rot at the heart of that court.” While Gawain is not an articulate hero, his conception of honor—the thing driving him out to finish his quest—is surely shaped by the Christian milieu of his youth. His desire to be a legend like his uncle is inspired by hearing of … the legend of his uncle, a Christian hero.
In paralleling Christianity and honor, the film is onto something. Christians are able to conceive of honor as the search for integrity, a quality which ultimately finds its only reward in God’s approval. “All I want is to enter my house justified,” says the protagonist in one of my favorite Westerns, Sam Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country. This line is meant to explain why the man pursues honor even against his own physical self-interest. And it echoes Christ’s parable of the humble tax collector, who, Christ says, “went down to his house justified” for he had pleased God. “All I want,” then, is to enter my Father’s house justified. If there is no God, then such honor-seeking really is mere vainglory. We should rather live practical, compromised lives that don’t take extraordinary risks for nonexistent spiritual rewards. (Read more.)
From Rotten Tomatoes:
David Lowery’s The Green Knight has earned a solidly Fresh Tomatometer score thanks to largely positive reviews and its position as theatrical counter-programming against the glut of big-budget summer blockbusters hitting theaters as of late. It’s a reimagining of the late 14th-century poem “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” which tells one of the most well-known stories in Arthurian legend canon – the tale of Sir Gawain, who accepts a terrifying challenge from a stranger on Christmas, and the quest he must embark on one year later.
It was a bold choice for Lowery to adapt a 700-year-old chivalric romance for the 21st century, and one that required a number of changes so that a story so profoundly rooted in the morality and literary style of the Middle Ages resonated with a modern audience. Here are five ways he changed the original Arthurian epic to do just that… and one important way he kept the medieval story intact. (Read more.)
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