The Green Knight is pretty to look at, I guess. Like a 4K tourism video of the Scottish moors playing in the window of a travel agency. Or a way more expensive version of Monty Python and the Holy Grail with fewer coconuts and rabbits. In fact, this thing sort of feels like something Terry Gilliam would have made, or at least would have squandered the budget on first ten minutes of before being sued by his producers. It has his sort of feel, something off-kilter, disorientingly close to reality but just beyond reach.
The Green Knight won’t appeal to most people because it is long, slow and broods more than a Black Veiled Bride fan whose mom told her she likes the band too because they’re “fun.” It’s artsy-fartsy, more like a 127-minute tone poem than a driving narrative. It has knives, axes, thieves and ghosts, but it never goes for the action jugular. Every swing of a sword is ponderous and supposed to mean something, even if the movie doesn’t really know what, or doesn’t realize its message has already been broadcast by better movies.
You know who will love it, though? Cosplayers and dudes who get into arguments on subreddits about who knows more about Arthurian legend. There will be guys dressed like hulking, leafy versions of the titular Green Knight at ComicCon, and then there will be women in barely anything but verdant body paint ready to take those guys’ money. There will be a run on Michaels’ hobby stores for Styrofoam and silver paint. Ultimately, the movie’s hero Gawain is a role model for m’lady incels, doffing his fedora and thinking he knows what the fuck chivalry means.
The story starts at Camelot at Christmastime, light snow falling and goodwill in the air. Gawain (Dev Patel), nephew to an aging King Arthur (Sean Harris), is a rascal drinking heavily and making moony eyes with a peasant girl (Alicia Vikander). You know she’s lower class because nobody else would get such a shitty tomboy haircut.
Gawain’s mom (Sarita Choudhury), the King’s sister, is worried her son’s a lout. Also, she’s a witch. This isn’t unusual. A lot of my friends’ moms were witches. They could do magic shit like summon the cops when they knew I was drunkenly trying to have sex with their garden hoses, or have a sixth sense when I was trying to steal their panties from the clothesline. But Gawain’s mom is more the “Double, double, toil and trouble” kind, or the Bellarians from Space Mutiny that wave a lot of gauzy cloth and speak incantations in dark rooms. Also, her character is pretty much as unnecessary as the Bellarians. Anyway, she does some hocus-pocus shit and summons the Green Knight, a mystic warrior made up of roots and leaves, to stir her son from his life of debauchery.
Gawain, eager to have a story to tell and to impress a roomful of strangers, accepts the Green Knight’s challenge: that whatever he does to the Green Knight, the Green Knight will do to him in one year’s time.
I feel Gawain. I know how intoxicating and irresistible the opportunity to impress a roomful of strangers can be. That’s why there’s an entire Elk’s Lodge in Washoe County that’s seen my penis. They weren’t impressed. They were also surprisingly eager to show me theirs. The point is, people will do stupid shit just to get others to like them: smoke clove cigarettes, get tattoos, go deep into debt to buy a car they’ll hate five years before the payments end, wrestle nuns.
Gawain is no different. When he could have made a simple gesture, such as a slight cut on the cheek to the Green Knight, he instead plays to the audience. He cuts off the Green Knight’s head. That means in one year the Green Knight gets to do the same back to him. The Green Knight is an embodiment of nature and doesn’t die the way Gawain will.
But lopping off a big ass knight’s head is baller move, and for a year Gawain can dine on his infamy. He’s BMOC, Big Man on Camelot. Dude’s not even planning to hold up his end of the bargain. He just thought he could cut off a knight’s head with no repercussions. As someone who has cut off a knight’s head, let me say this is not how the deal works. You will pay, voluntarily or otherwise. Also, let me say that when I say I cut off a knight’s head it’s a euphemism for urinating into the open sunroof of a BMW of a guy who made fun of my shoes. Whatever, this story ends like most of my stories, with me drenched in the piss of a douchebag.
King Arthur lets the young, foolhardy kid know it would be bad form to renege, and that he would lose respect and a shot at the throne. So, one year hence, at Christmastime, when snow softly falls again and the landscape is gray, the reluctant hero must make a six-day journey to the Green Knight’s Green Chapel to have his head removed. Of course, this is a journey to turn him into a man, where manhood is not measured in pubic hairs but in courage and sacrifice. I prefer doing it by pubic hairs. My manhood is 472.
The whiny self-absorbed boy, ala Luke Sywalker, finds a more noble cause than selfishly getting squared up on the ladies and the hooch. Along the way, he is robbed of the sword loaned to him by the king by thieves. He encounters the ghost of St. Winifred, who asks him to recover her head from the bottom of a bog. When he asks what’s in it for him she is appalled that this is all he can think of. “Food for thought,” the movie tells us. He is turned down by androgynous giants when he asks them for a ride. And he betrays a castle-owner, who shares with him his wife, home and food, but Gawain keeps without sharing a raiment with magical powers. Mostly, though, the guy wanders through swirling fog.
Each of his episodic adventures is more padded than the bras of sixth-grade girls catfishing on Tinder. Each is also supposed to be another stepping stone in Gawain learning what honor and chivalry are. That is, the duty of a knight to serve others, particularly those most in need. In other words, Jedis. Gawain is joined on his quest by a bad CGI fox, something that looks like it has escaped from a North Korean ripoff of a Disney animated movie. The fox’s movement is so unnatural as to be distracting and clearly fake whenever it’s on the screen. It talks too!
And that’s the thing with The Green Knight. It’s telling an old ass story with a message pounded into us forever about a self-absorbed man finding a higher calling. I’m thinking High Noon and Star Wars and African Queen and Seven Samurai, to name a few more exciting movies, flicks that can be enjoyed because they’re fun. The problem here is that this knight’s tale is so invested in a tired message. Once you understand message the rest is pretty damn boring. Lovely, but boring. Sort of like my friend Worm’s new Latvian wife.
In the end, Gawain considers chickening out, but has a vision of a slide down a slippery slope of dishonor into a life of chaos and misery. Bad things happen to bad people, the movie tells us. Yeah, sure. Clearly director/writer David Lowery hasn’t been paying much attention the last few years. Two Fingers for The Green Knight. It’s the same shit, just in Arthur’s robes this time.