David Lowery doesn’t get mentioned among the great directors of the 2010s, but he belongs among them. Lowery’s impressive ability to craft moods and feelings from a single image makes all films he touches a notch better than other directors out there. I mean, of all the pretty terrible Disney live action remakes, his Pete’s Dragon is the only one that legitimately is better than the original. So Lowery was the smart choice to take on a King Arthur tale. After numerous failed franchising attempts, Lowery goes back to basics and gives us a terrific rendering of Arthurian legend with The Green Knight, a one off artistic delight that tells its whole story in 2 hours.
King Arthur (Sean Harris) is in The Green Knight, but he’s a supporting character: an old ruler running his kingdom. The Green Knight is about Arthur’s nephew Gawain (Dev Patel). Gawain is interested in worldly pleasures: drinking and hooking up with his lover Essel (Alicia Vikander), uninterested in becoming a knight or living a life of honor. That all changes on Christmas day, when a mysterious Green Knight (Ralph Ineson) shows up in Arthur’s court and challenges the kingdom. Gawain meets The Green Knight’s challenge, but part of that challenge means in a year, Gawain must seek out the Green Chapel and face the Green Knight again or else face horrific consequences for the kingdom and everyone Gawain loves.
There’s exactly one swordfight in The Green Knight, and even that is over very quickly. This is more of a cerebral quest than a physical one. Lowery’s inspiration for Gawain’s quest is an unholy union of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Don Quixote, The Seventh Seal, and Edgar Wright’s filmmography. The director knows what the audience expects with a knight’s quest; however, here he’s more interested in deconstructing the mechanics of those quests. The smartest decision (among many smart ones) is crafting the quest around the character at its center. We don’t have some chivalrous selfless warrior here: Dev Patel’s Gawain is a purposeless worldly coward, thrust into this quest without understanding or considering the consequences of his actions because of his pampered upbringing. Lowery repeatedly shows us how Gawain is unable to meet most challenges he faces, and even when he does, he misunderstands the lessons of his trials because of the stories he’s heard from other, better knights. Even so, Gawain learns over the course of his journey a valuable lesson, using his gift of foresight to find the clarity and purpose he was looking for just in time for his confrontation with the Green Knight.
Lowery hides this historical critique of knighthood with a dazzling set of directorial distractions. He really makes Gawain’s quest feel like something we’ve read or seen in movies before. Each quest is intricately staged in beautiful sets to elicit those moods he wants: trepidation, supernatural eeriness, lust, etc. Equal in Lowery’s directorial talents is his wonderful cast. Dev Patel finally gets a chance to show that charisma he possessed in Slumdog Millionaire to play a hero in a fantasy or superhero movie. Alicia Vikander, though underutilized, gives it her all, especially playing a Lady of a Castle. And special shouts to Barry Keoghan, who uses the opposite of that Sacred Deer energy to craft an equally charismatic creepy charmer. Lowery populates the rest of his cast with great character actors like Joel Edgerton, Sean Harris, Kate Dickie, Ralph Ineson, Erin Kellyman, and Sarita Choudhury to usually wordlessly give his fantasy the power and import Lowery needs it to have for his story to work.
The Green Knight continues David Lowery’s excellence as a director to be reckoned with, probably destined to make something truly special himself. It also continues his pattern of “one for you, one for me” director choices. His next movie sends him back to Disney, doing a Peter Pan live action film. While I loved the cartoon, Hook and even Benh Zeitlin’s Wendy, those films have flaws. I’ll think some Tinker Bell Happy Thoughts for you David Lowery, hoping that you get to make that perfect film you’re going to make!