Jenna Benchetrit 
© Eric Zachanowich Dev Patel stars in The Green Knight, a film adaptation of the 14th century epic poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
Arthurian legend is no stranger to the big screen and the latest in that line, The Green Knight starring Dev Patel, has already opened to rave reviews.
But some are hoping the 14th century epic poem it is inspired by — Sir Gawain and the Green Knight — becomes the real breakout star.
In A24's latest film, Patel stars as Sir Gawain, a nephew of King Arthur who sets out on a fantastical journey to challenge the Green Knight, a strange, towering figure with green skin and a seemingly indestructible exterior. The film hit Canadian theatres on Friday.
Appeal of Arthurian legends
Directed by David Lowery, the filmmaker behind Ain't Them Bodies Saints and A Ghost Story, the film is the latest in a long line of adapted Arthurian legends that has movie buffs and medievalists alike excited for its release.
"It's a story about an ambitious young person who maybe, in the beginning, bites off more than he can chew," said writer Robin Sloan, who each year performs a live virtual reading of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, translated into modern English by poet Simon Armitage.
"I hope I'll hear at least a few of those alliterative bouncing rhythms spoken by Dev Patel, or the narrator or someone else, because I think they're, for me, the most special part of the poem," said Sloan, who is also the author of the novel Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore.
The film was due to be released last May, Lowery said in a recent interview with The Globe and Mail. When the pandemic upset those plans, the director said it gave him a chance to "revisit it with fresh eyes."
If early reviews are any indication, the extra moments in the editing room paid off.
Justin Chang of The Los Angeles Times called it "a bewitching feat of revisionist mythmaking, the kind that implores you to look upon an old story with newly appreciative eyes." The New York Times' A.O. Scott said it's a movie "worth watching twice" while Alison Willmore at Vulture wrote that it is a "ravishing and unsettling fantasy."
"It's just — it's visual poetry," said Jeffrey Zhang, chief critic and editor of pop culture website Strange Harbours. "I think that's what this film really is."
Available in the public domain and holding wide appeal, Arthurian legends make for easy adaptations, Zhang said.
Poem was unknown for centuries
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is an epic poem with a fittingly storied history. Written in the late 14th century by an unknown writer who has since been dubbed "The Pearl Poet," the text was virtually unknown until a 19th century British researcher came across it.
Only a single copy of the original manuscript has been discovered.
"It's not like it was a hit in the year 1427," Sloan said. "Instead, it basically sat unread, unknown in a library— it was passed around from collection to collection."
It was almost destroyed in a fire in London in the 1700s that claimed other manuscripts, he said.
"We'll never know what was on them or what stories were lost in that fire. But just by sheer luck, Sir Gawain in the Green Knight was spared," he said.
Alexandra Gillespie, a former English professor at the University of Toronto who has taught on Sir Gawain and The Green Knight, said that the "complex," "jewel-like" poem — along with other texts from the Pearl Poet — makes rich use of historical Middle English.
Arthurian legend is no stranger to the big screen and the latest in that line, The Green Knight starring Dev Patel, has already opened to rave reviews.
But some are hoping the 14th century epic poem it is inspired by — Sir Gawain and the Green Knight — becomes the real breakout star.
In A24's latest film, Patel stars as Sir Gawain, a nephew of King Arthur who sets out on a fantastical journey to challenge the Green Knight, a strange, towering figure with green skin and a seemingly indestructible exterior. The film hit Canadian theatres on Friday.
Appeal of Arthurian legends
Directed by David Lowery, the filmmaker behind Ain't Them Bodies Saints and A Ghost Story, the film is the latest in a long line of adapted Arthurian legends that has movie buffs and medievalists alike excited for its release.
"It's a story about an ambitious young person who maybe, in the beginning, bites off more than he can chew," said writer Robin Sloan, who each year performs a live virtual reading of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, translated into modern English by poet Simon Armitage.
"I hope I'll hear at least a few of those alliterative bouncing rhythms spoken by Dev Patel, or the narrator or someone else, because I think they're, for me, the most special part of the poem," said Sloan, who is also the author of the novel Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore.
The film was due to be released last May, Lowery said in a recent interview with The Globe and Mail. When the pandemic upset those plans, the director said it gave him a chance to "revisit it with fresh eyes."
If early reviews are any indication, the extra moments in the editing room paid off.
Justin Chang of The Los Angeles Times called it "a bewitching feat of revisionist mythmaking, the kind that implores you to look upon an old story with newly appreciative eyes." The New York Times' A.O. Scott said it's a movie "worth watching twice" while Alison Willmore at Vulture wrote that it is a "ravishing and unsettling fantasy."
"It's just — it's visual poetry," said Jeffrey Zhang, chief critic and editor of pop culture website Strange Harbours. "I think that's what this film really is."
Available in the public domain and holding wide appeal, Arthurian legends make for easy adaptations, Zhang said.
Poem was unknown for centuries
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is an epic poem with a fittingly storied history. Written in the late 14th century by an unknown writer who has since been dubbed "The Pearl Poet," the text was virtually unknown until a 19th century British researcher came across it.
Only a single copy of the original manuscript has been discovered.
"It's not like it was a hit in the year 1427," Sloan said. "Instead, it basically sat unread, unknown in a library— it was passed around from collection to collection."
It was almost destroyed in a fire in London in the 1700s that claimed other manuscripts, he said.
"We'll never know what was on them or what stories were lost in that fire. But just by sheer luck, Sir Gawain in the Green Knight was spared," he said.
Alexandra Gillespie, a former English professor at the University of Toronto who has taught on Sir Gawain and The Green Knight, said that the "complex," "jewel-like" poem — along with other texts from the Pearl Poet — makes rich use of historical Middle English.
Jackson Weaver/CBC News Alexandra Gillespie taught a fourth-year capstone seminar on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight at the University of Toronto-Mississauga.
"They are alliterative poems," she said. "So the first letter of many words in a single line will be the same, though they also have patterns of rhyme and other kinds of meter and they're really, really intricate."
The text's recurring green motif is a symbol of sexuality, fertility, nature and abundance, Gillespie said.
"Green is also the death that encroaches on you, the decay that is always just around the corner," she said.
Sloan said that much of the poem's appeal is in its use of language paired with a narrative that can be surprising.
"I mean, it's an Arthurian quest, but it's not like the others," he said. "I truly believe this is -- it's not like the others. It's really a special piece of work in history."
On the big screen and beyond, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has proved to be particularly fruitful source material, with its hero appearing in a range of media.
There's the 1973 film Gawain and the Green Knight, and its 1984 remake, Sword of the Valiant; there's a BAFTA-winning 2002 animated short film that shares the poem's name. There is also a 2008 documentary that explores the hero's journey and the 2011 television series Camelot features Clive Standen as Gawain.
The 1991 opera Gawain is just one of many stage adaptations. And there's even the Green Knight-inspired video game, Chronicles of the Sword.
For Sloan, whose yearly readings of the poem draw in viewers from around the world, the film is an opportunity for people to appreciate the centuries-old text.
I hope that when people watch a movie like this and become aware of its source material, it connects them to a time scale that's a little bit broader than the one we're often sort of zoomed into and locked into," he said.
Still, many stories of Arthurian legend have received an underwhelming reception at the box office.
Most recently, 2017's King Arthur: Legend of the Sword lost a whopping $153.2 million US for Warner Bros. King Arthur, released in 2004, grossed only $203.6 million US against its $120 million US budget. And Sean Connery's 1995 film The First Knight was ill-received by audiences and critics.
So while Lowery takes a risk in adapting The Green Knight, its Arthurian origins could resonate with audiences who are excited by tales of swords and sorcery in the vein of The Lord of the Rings, or even the knight-like superheroes in franchises like the Avengers, Gillespie said.
"They are alliterative poems," she said. "So the first letter of many words in a single line will be the same, though they also have patterns of rhyme and other kinds of meter and they're really, really intricate."
The text's recurring green motif is a symbol of sexuality, fertility, nature and abundance, Gillespie said.
"Green is also the death that encroaches on you, the decay that is always just around the corner," she said.
Sloan said that much of the poem's appeal is in its use of language paired with a narrative that can be surprising.
"I mean, it's an Arthurian quest, but it's not like the others," he said. "I truly believe this is -- it's not like the others. It's really a special piece of work in history."
On the big screen and beyond, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has proved to be particularly fruitful source material, with its hero appearing in a range of media.
There's the 1973 film Gawain and the Green Knight, and its 1984 remake, Sword of the Valiant; there's a BAFTA-winning 2002 animated short film that shares the poem's name. There is also a 2008 documentary that explores the hero's journey and the 2011 television series Camelot features Clive Standen as Gawain.
The 1991 opera Gawain is just one of many stage adaptations. And there's even the Green Knight-inspired video game, Chronicles of the Sword.
For Sloan, whose yearly readings of the poem draw in viewers from around the world, the film is an opportunity for people to appreciate the centuries-old text.
I hope that when people watch a movie like this and become aware of its source material, it connects them to a time scale that's a little bit broader than the one we're often sort of zoomed into and locked into," he said.
Still, many stories of Arthurian legend have received an underwhelming reception at the box office.
Most recently, 2017's King Arthur: Legend of the Sword lost a whopping $153.2 million US for Warner Bros. King Arthur, released in 2004, grossed only $203.6 million US against its $120 million US budget. And Sean Connery's 1995 film The First Knight was ill-received by audiences and critics.
So while Lowery takes a risk in adapting The Green Knight, its Arthurian origins could resonate with audiences who are excited by tales of swords and sorcery in the vein of The Lord of the Rings, or even the knight-like superheroes in franchises like the Avengers, Gillespie said.
'The Green Knight' is the best medieval takedown since 'Monty Python and the Holy Grail'
Noah Berlatsky
Director David Lowery’s new film “The Green Knight,” out Friday, comes draped in lush visuals and the cultural caché of the medieval epic poem on which the story is based. But the movie’s modern, slyly deflationary approach to its material has as much to do with that classic film of antiheroism, “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” as it does with high Arthurian legend.
Noah Berlatsky
Director David Lowery’s new film “The Green Knight,” out Friday, comes draped in lush visuals and the cultural caché of the medieval epic poem on which the story is based. But the movie’s modern, slyly deflationary approach to its material has as much to do with that classic film of antiheroism, “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” as it does with high Arthurian legend.
© Provided by NBC News
Lowery doesn’t quite have the Pythons’ genius for nonsense and antistructure. But in his somewhat quieter, highbrow vein, he, too, manages to effectively fart in the general direction of noble sacrifice, honor and narrative. It may not be the greatest film to ever mock Arthurian legend, but it’s a solid and worthwhile second.
As most people who took high school English probably remember, “Gawain and the Green Knight” is set in the time of King Arthur. In the story, a giant green knight interrupts a Christmas feast of the knights of the Round Table and offers to take any blow one of the knights there can give him. In exchange, he will return the blow a year hence. It doesn’t seem like a great bargain, but brave Gawain accepts and promptly strikes off the knight’s head—at which point the green giant unexpectedly picks the severed head up and rides off. First, though, he tells Gawain he has to find him at his Green Chapel a year hence to fulfill his pledge and be beheaded himself.
In the original poem, Gawain is a typically heroic sort, filled to the top of his (temporarily attached) head with honor and nobility and bravery and all the other virtues. The movie version, where Gawain is played by Dev Patel, is a different matter. He’s the king’s nephew, and while he longs vaguely for glory, he spends most of his days drinking and fornicating. In this telling, Gawain impetuously accepts the challenge from the Green Knight (Ralph Ineson) less out of chivalry than to prove himself to the king (Sean Harris). A year later, Gawain shows understandably little interest in going to find the knight who has promised to behead him; the king has to badger him into it with vague rewards of greatness and honor.
It’s not just the King who badgers Gawain, however. The movie sometimes seems like a conspiracy against him, though a conspiracy by whom is hard to say. His mother, Morgan Le’Fay (Sarita Choudhury) performs some rituals which may or may not have to do with the Green Knight’s appearance, suggesting she’s plotting against her son to destroy him, or maybe test him, or maybe out of some unknown motivation. Other people Gawain meets along the way—like the mysterious, possibly dead Winifred (Erin Kellyman)—seem to know more than him about his quest.
All these shadowy manipulators make the narrative feel like a kind of put on, or a “game” as the Green Knight himself calls the Christmas challenge. Gawain has to go on a quest because in legends (and, not coincidentally, in Hollywood movies) the hero goes on a quest. Doing so demonstrates and inculcates heroism and other admirable qualities, supposedly. (As Gawain and other characters point out more than once, going to get your head cut off seems more foolhardy than admirable.)
Nor does Gawain ever come into his own bravery and generosity in the accepted Hollywood fashion. He never gets to show off his skills in swordplay, if he even has any; there’s less fight choreography in “The Green Knight” than in the ostentatiously low-budget “Holy Grail.”
Instead, Gawain gets fooled, intimidated, robbed and seduced along his journey. He loses the scarf which is supposed to magically protect him. Winifred has to chastise him into doing something semi-heroic. (“A knight should know better!” she harrumphs.) Whenever he comes upon skeleton remains—hanging at a crossroads, sunken in a pond, coming upon him in a vision—his lips curl in disgust and horror.
Nor does Patel ever lose his look of hangdog confusion and misery; he always seems like he’d much rather be doing something else. The only time he seems truly happy is in the movie’s opening scene. There he radiates earthy bonhomie and goodwill, before his destiny seizes him by the nether regions.
But what is that destiny? The movie offers various speculations. Perhaps Gawain is meant to become king himself, and this is his trial by fire and sword. Perhaps the Green Knight is a symbol of death, and Gawain’s progress toward him is a progress toward the green moss that grows over a corpse: Wisdom is confronting the end of life on which more life grows in an endless cycle of rebirth, new heads sprouting from old shoulders, world without end.
Thanks in part to Patel’s subtle and not-so-subtle expressions of skepticism and irritation, these multiple explanations and possibilities come across less as ancient mystery than modern absurdity. Lowery reads a touch of Kafka back into the medieval legend, and the Green Knight’s magical bargain becomes a kind of bureaucratic hoop. Gawain signed a contract and now he has to fulfill the terms, however pointless or brutal, in the name of some abstract principle that everyone has decided is more important than his life.
The police don’t show up and take everyone away, as at the end of “Holy Grail,” but the conclusion is almost as blankly anticlimactic. Arthur and his knights remain a symbol of heroism and tragic nobility. As such, films about Arthur and his knights remain a good way to kick heroism in the shins, or to point out that tragedy is more often irritating and pointless than noble. Gawain is the butt of a joke, not a hero. And the joke is precisely that heroes are butts. The narrative shoves him here and there and he staggers along, toward whatever green fate awaits him.
Lowery doesn’t quite have the Pythons’ genius for nonsense and antistructure. But in his somewhat quieter, highbrow vein, he, too, manages to effectively fart in the general direction of noble sacrifice, honor and narrative. It may not be the greatest film to ever mock Arthurian legend, but it’s a solid and worthwhile second.
As most people who took high school English probably remember, “Gawain and the Green Knight” is set in the time of King Arthur. In the story, a giant green knight interrupts a Christmas feast of the knights of the Round Table and offers to take any blow one of the knights there can give him. In exchange, he will return the blow a year hence. It doesn’t seem like a great bargain, but brave Gawain accepts and promptly strikes off the knight’s head—at which point the green giant unexpectedly picks the severed head up and rides off. First, though, he tells Gawain he has to find him at his Green Chapel a year hence to fulfill his pledge and be beheaded himself.
In the original poem, Gawain is a typically heroic sort, filled to the top of his (temporarily attached) head with honor and nobility and bravery and all the other virtues. The movie version, where Gawain is played by Dev Patel, is a different matter. He’s the king’s nephew, and while he longs vaguely for glory, he spends most of his days drinking and fornicating. In this telling, Gawain impetuously accepts the challenge from the Green Knight (Ralph Ineson) less out of chivalry than to prove himself to the king (Sean Harris). A year later, Gawain shows understandably little interest in going to find the knight who has promised to behead him; the king has to badger him into it with vague rewards of greatness and honor.
It’s not just the King who badgers Gawain, however. The movie sometimes seems like a conspiracy against him, though a conspiracy by whom is hard to say. His mother, Morgan Le’Fay (Sarita Choudhury) performs some rituals which may or may not have to do with the Green Knight’s appearance, suggesting she’s plotting against her son to destroy him, or maybe test him, or maybe out of some unknown motivation. Other people Gawain meets along the way—like the mysterious, possibly dead Winifred (Erin Kellyman)—seem to know more than him about his quest.
All these shadowy manipulators make the narrative feel like a kind of put on, or a “game” as the Green Knight himself calls the Christmas challenge. Gawain has to go on a quest because in legends (and, not coincidentally, in Hollywood movies) the hero goes on a quest. Doing so demonstrates and inculcates heroism and other admirable qualities, supposedly. (As Gawain and other characters point out more than once, going to get your head cut off seems more foolhardy than admirable.)
Nor does Gawain ever come into his own bravery and generosity in the accepted Hollywood fashion. He never gets to show off his skills in swordplay, if he even has any; there’s less fight choreography in “The Green Knight” than in the ostentatiously low-budget “Holy Grail.”
Instead, Gawain gets fooled, intimidated, robbed and seduced along his journey. He loses the scarf which is supposed to magically protect him. Winifred has to chastise him into doing something semi-heroic. (“A knight should know better!” she harrumphs.) Whenever he comes upon skeleton remains—hanging at a crossroads, sunken in a pond, coming upon him in a vision—his lips curl in disgust and horror.
Nor does Patel ever lose his look of hangdog confusion and misery; he always seems like he’d much rather be doing something else. The only time he seems truly happy is in the movie’s opening scene. There he radiates earthy bonhomie and goodwill, before his destiny seizes him by the nether regions.
But what is that destiny? The movie offers various speculations. Perhaps Gawain is meant to become king himself, and this is his trial by fire and sword. Perhaps the Green Knight is a symbol of death, and Gawain’s progress toward him is a progress toward the green moss that grows over a corpse: Wisdom is confronting the end of life on which more life grows in an endless cycle of rebirth, new heads sprouting from old shoulders, world without end.
Thanks in part to Patel’s subtle and not-so-subtle expressions of skepticism and irritation, these multiple explanations and possibilities come across less as ancient mystery than modern absurdity. Lowery reads a touch of Kafka back into the medieval legend, and the Green Knight’s magical bargain becomes a kind of bureaucratic hoop. Gawain signed a contract and now he has to fulfill the terms, however pointless or brutal, in the name of some abstract principle that everyone has decided is more important than his life.
The police don’t show up and take everyone away, as at the end of “Holy Grail,” but the conclusion is almost as blankly anticlimactic. Arthur and his knights remain a symbol of heroism and tragic nobility. As such, films about Arthur and his knights remain a good way to kick heroism in the shins, or to point out that tragedy is more often irritating and pointless than noble. Gawain is the butt of a joke, not a hero. And the joke is precisely that heroes are butts. The narrative shoves him here and there and he staggers along, toward whatever green fate awaits him.
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