There's not a lot that could convince me I would be better off living in the Middle Ages. I mean, I really love washing my hands and not dying of the common cold. As a lifelong lover of poetry, however, there's one thing I've always lamented about my 20th-century birth. Unless something drastic changes about the way we communicate in this day and age, I'll never be part of a great oral tradition. I can read copies of The Odyssey or Beowulf until the bindings give out, but I'll never fully experience those stories as they were meant to be heard. I'll never be there at their birth or watch them morph and change as they're passed down from generation to generation. I can memorize words that have been frozen in ink and time, but it will never be quite the same as watching them truly live.
But while all of us lucky (or unlucky) enough to be born in the age of the iPhone will have to go on living with our paper Homers and e-reader Beowulf poets, there is a next best thing: film adaptations that make the epic poems of old come to life in a way their original tellers never could have dreamed.
Let me tell you instead a new tale.
I'll lay it down as I've heard it told.
Its letters set, its history pressed, of an adventure brave and bold.
Forever set, in heart, in stone, like all great myths of old.
So narrates the ghostly voice that welcomes viewers into the sinuous, mercurial world of David Lowry's 2021 film The Green Knight. That voice may as well have been ripped directly from the 14th century, when Sir Gawain And The Green Knight, the chivalric romance on which the film is based, was originally conceived. Like the poem by "anonymous," as an onscreen inscription reads, The Green Knight follows Gawain (Dev Patel), the naive and petulant nephew of King Arthur (Sean Harris). Despite his lofty bloodline, Gawain is perfectly content to wile away his days in a local brothel, in complete defiance of the chivalric code a young man of his stature would have been expected to follow at the time. That is, until one fateful Christmas dinner, when a mysterious knight interrupts the proceedings at the Round Table with a tricky little game. Any man brave enough may try to land a blow against the intruding knight, but whatever harm they dole out — be it "a scratch on the cheek or a cut to the throat" — the intruder will return unto them in one year's time. Gawain volunteers in an attempt to prove his mettle and lops the knight's head off, only for the seemingly immortal figure to rise and remind him of his deal — one which now means almost certain death.
On the surface, this may seem like a classic fantasy quest. A young knight must ride out into the unknown to prove his virtue against a great foe, with his life and legacy hanging in the balance. The resulting movie, however, is anything but typical. The Green Knight is, to put it simply, very, very weird. Viewers are dropped in the middle of this vast Arthurian legend with no roadmap to help identify characters or their relationships to one another whatsoever. (I watched a healthy amount of BBC's Merlin when I was younger, and I still had to pause the film once or twice to look up who certain characters were on a first watch.) The cinematography is dreamlike and frequently opaque; scenes and images seem to flow in and out of each other by their own sense of will, rather than the push of any external hand. Beauty is interwoven with decay, reality gives way to the surreal, and gritty humanity mutates into stunning, mythic fantasy faster than even the film's protagonist can truly wrap his head around. Take one scene, wherein Gawain is tasked with returning the head of the dead Saint Winifred (Erin Kellyman), which she has lost in a stream. "Are you real or are you a spirit?" Gawain asks the corporeal-seeming lady standing beside him. "What is the difference?" she responds. If the film can be said to have a singular thesis, it's in this simple exchange.
If all of this sounds a bit intimidating or hard to parse, all one really needs is a shift in perspective — just like Saint Winifred suggested. No, The Green Knight doesn't operate under standard film logic, or even under classic fantasy film logic. But it does follow a more traditional poetic code. "The poem is such a tremendous piece of work," Lowry told IndieWire of the original text in 2021. "By adhering to it, even though I did extrapolate from it, the poem did me some favors because it’s so rich. When people read the script, whether or not they were familiar with the original poem or not, they really responded to it. It’s something that has endured for over 600 years. All I had to do was illuminate it and provide a roadmap for translating it to film."
By letting Sir Gawain And The Green Knight, in all of its lush, sensuous texture, guide the process, Lowry crafted a film that truly feels like a poem. That's rare in Hollywood — especially these days, as gritty realism continues to rule the box office. Consider, for example, Christopher Nolan's upcoming The Odyssey, a very different interpretation of another classic epic. The Odyssey, like the rest of Nolan's filmography, is all about authenticity and big, practical sets. "We got the cast who play the crew of Odysseus’ ship out there on the real waves, in the real places. And yeah, it’s vast and terrifying and wonderful and benevolent, as the conditions shift," the filmmaker told Empire in a recent interview. "We really wanted to capture how hard those journeys would have been for people."
This isn't to say that Nolan's approach is necessarily wrong. We'll see how his commitment to the veracity of Odysseus' experience serves the text when the film hits theaters later this year. Still, as some of the magic and color of Homer's epic gives way to dark seas and shadowy journeys, films like The Green Knight provide a welcome salve for readers who love poetry for the wonder it can conjure.
Lowry isn't resting on his laurels, either. Later this month, the filmmaker will release Mother Mary, a psychological thriller starring Anne Hathaway as a pop star involved in a supernatural entanglement with a fashion designer played by Michaela Coel. Like The Green Knight, Mother Mary will be "a weird, weird film," as Lowry himself characterized in a different IndieWire interview. "It is a movie I am sure will provoke a lot of strong feelings, in every possible direction," he added. Maybe this one will feel like a song. For now, I'm glad I was born in a time where I can find out.
