In “The Green Knight,” Chivalry Was Always Dead

“Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” the beloved fourteenth-century poem, begins during Christmastime at the court of King Arthur, when a giant man the color of spinach rides into the banquet hall with a proposition. He will accept any blow from one of Arthur’s knights if, in a year and a day’s time, that knight will come to his own home, the Green Chapel, and receive a blow in return. Arthur wants to take up the challenge, but his nephew Gawain intercedes. “I’m the weakest, I know, and the feeblest in spirit,” he declares, “so my life would be the least loss.” (This is politesse; Gawain craves adventure and glory.) With a stroke, Gawain decapitates the giant, who calmly picks up his head and rides away: see you in a year.

The next winter, Gawain, lavishly armed, sets off in search of the Green Chapel. Eventually, half-dead from cold and hunger, he arrives at a castle—“It shimmered and shone through mighty oaks”—where a lordly host and his beautiful wife shower him with comforts. The host, too, has a proposition. During the day, he will hunt while Gawain rests; in the evening, he will give Gawain the spoils of the chase, and Gawain will give him whatever he’s won at the castle. The next morning, the host’s wife creeps into Gawain’s chambers. “You are welcome to my body,” she murmurs. He parries her advances but accepts her kiss, and plants his own on the lord during the night’s exchange. This happens twice more; the last time, the lady also offers a magic belt, which is said to make its wearer invincible. Gawain, thinking of his appointment with doom, keeps the gift. The following day, he goes to the chapel, where the Green Knight swings his axe, grazing Gawain’s neck. That’s for withholding the belt, the Knight booms, revealing himself as the host. “You like being alive. I don’t blame you!” Gawain, riven with remorse, drapes the belt over his shoulder—“a sign of my sinfulness”—and rides home a wiser, truer knight.

Only the broadest outlines of this inscrutable poem can be seen in “The Green Knight,” a bewitching (and even more inscrutable) new film directed by David Lowery (“A Ghost Story,” “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints”). One obvious departure is the unmaking—I think this is the most accurate term—of the character of Gawain. In the text, we meet our hero fully formed, already the flower of chivalry. “As much as pearls surpass peas in value, / so Gawain compares to other fine knights,” a character declares. He is chaste, yet possesses the manners of a consummate courtly lover. By contrast, the movie’s Gawain, played with loose-limbed, charming incorrigibility by Dev Patel, is untested, unknown, and a bit of a ne’er-do-well. He refuses to make an honest woman of his sweetheart, Essel, and he displays none of the source character’s martial power or verbal eloquence. (“You’re not very good with questions,” the host teases.) When brigands intercept him on his journey to the Green Chapel, this Gawain equivocates about whether he’s even a knight at all.

It’s a question that would seem, in the poem, ridiculous. The original character feels governed by his social role, shaped in every trait and gesture by the values of the warrior élite. Lowery’s Gawain seeks a more individual code, if he seeks a code at all. “Honor,” he tells the host, uncertainly, “is part of the life I want.”

A Gawain who hasn’t fully bought into chivalry—who seems poised at the beginning of an ambiguous bildungsroman—is an unrecognizable Gawain, and the reverberations of his apostasy transform the story. Much of the original drama stemmed from a situation in which a faultless hero had to navigate contradictory rules. Gawain was duty-bound both to obey the lady’s wishes and to honor his host. He needed to keep his pact with the monster and, simultaneously, to elude death. (Being dead is incompatible with starring in a chivalric romance.) But the movie’s Gawain is already ambivalent about his calling. It’s hard to know what the tests he might face could prove. The introduction of Essel becomes another step toward messy interiority: should Gawain succumb to his host’s wife’s charms, he would be betraying not an ideal but a specific woman, with whom he has a complex and murky relationship. (Significantly, Gawain has not pledged a formal vow to Essel, as he has to male characters such as the Knight and the host.)

That Gawain is, at best, chivalry-curious—in a way, he is himself a “green” warrior—mirrors the perspective of the film itself. This is another tectonic shift. The unknown author of the poem, who seems to have been a devout Christian, advances a religious critique of the romance genre—but respectfully, on the genre’s own terms. Lowery’s challenge is less courtly, casting courtesy as a manipulation, a cover for cruelty and deceit. There is little gallantry in this Camelot. The men of the Round Table, rather than welcoming the Green Knight to their feast, as in the text, immediately draw their swords. Sean Harris’s Arthur, enfeebled by years of moral compromise, boasts of making the Saxons “bow their heads like babes.” (Later, the camera sweeps dismally across fields of slaughter.) The verse groans with exquisite pleasures—“double portions” of meat and drink, sweet music, splendid clothes—in a rousing defense of the world that chivalry has built. But the movie’s palette, at least indoors, is dingy and uninviting. There are goats, dung, a generalized hostility to showers. Compared with the contents of the poem, civilization seems at once frailer and less worth fighting for.

And yet the movie does appear to consecrate certain human values. When Gawain tells Essel that he is off to the Green Chapel in pursuit of “greatness,” she replies, “Why is goodness not enough?” Goodness would seem to overlap with aspects of chivalry: keeping one’s word, providing for the vulnerable, helping the lost. Still, the film’s broader moral vision remains up for grabs. If Gawain completes his turn in a nihilistic game, is that heroic or foolish? Would using magic to save his own life be clever or sinful? It is unclear what a happy resolution for our hero—who could end up a knight, or a king, or dead—would look like. The destabilization here goes beyond suspense, beyond not knowing what Gawain will do when confronted with temptation. In this more profoundly disorienting—and modern—version of romance, we don’t know, at any given moment, what the protagonist should do.

In the absence of an external, structuring ethic, “The Green Knight” plunges into psychological fantasia. Interestingly, this keeps faith with the text, which is also a hybrid, layering the conventions of the French and English courts over a deep vein of Celtic myth. A mysterious lyricism surfaces in the poem’s descriptions of natural, rather than man-made, beauty: “But then comes autumn to harden the grain, / to warn it to ripen ahead of the winter. / Its dryness makes the dust swirl around / and fling up high off the face of the earth.” It is this register that the film, with its keening choral soundtrack and cascades of mystical light, seems to want to tap. The movie’s middle act unspools a sequence of wondrous encounters of Lowery’s own invention. There are androgynous singing giants and a talking fox. Visual fragments swim together in a soft, prophetic confusion. I thought not of chivalric romance but of a different medieval form, the dream vision, in which sense is suspended and meaning comes in flashes.

This world may be tended by laws, but they are not the laws of man. For proof, look no further than the color green, which, according to the host’s wife, played with icy purpose by Alicia Vikander, is a hue of growth and decay, of what persists “when passion dies.” The movie is preoccupied with literal remains—corpses and skeletons—not as symbols of finality but as heralds of an essential porousness between the realms of the living and the dead. When Gawain is attacked and tied up by thieves, the camera pans slowly around the forest before alighting on a bundle of rag-covered bones. There’s a sweep in reverse, and our hero is back, wresting free of his bonds. One senses a flirtation with horror here, and the same dark sublimity resides in the poem itself, which, beneath its wealth and manners, is extremely metal. (There’s no forgetting the stanza in which Gawain, awaiting his fate at the Chapel, hears an unearthly screaming noise: the grinding of an axe.) Both versions insist the terrors that one encounters outside—and, equally, inside, when one thinks one is safe—are part of the thrill, the fullness, of being alive.

If this is a trade, it’s not the type that the chivalric code, with its games and gentlemen’s agreements, is meant to accommodate. Lowery seems eager to dispel the frivolous quid pro quos that define the romance as a form. During the film’s odd and meandering middle section, Gawain comes upon a young woman, Winifred, who has lost her head. (A Welsh saint by that name was decapitated in the seventh century.) She begs the knight to help her find it. He seems ready to agree, and then, as if remembering his lines, wonders what she will give him in return. “Why would you ask me that,” she replies. “Why would you ever ask me that?” It’s hard not to think, when watching the scene, of the etymological link between “question” and “quest,” and to conclude that Lowery is striving, even gallantly, to reanimate the second with the first.