Genre: Fantasy
Premise: The King’s nephew must travel into the countryside and defeat a giant green knight if he is to become a knight himself.
About: David Lowery made his first short film, Lullaby, at 19 years old. He continued to make lots of short films before breaking into features in 2009 with his movie, St. Nick, about a brother and sister who escape into and begin living in the woods. He has since directed A Ghost Story, Pete’s Dragon, The Old Man and the Gun, and is rumored to be involved in, gasp, another big budget studio adaptation of Peter Pan. Slumdog Millionaire’s Dev Patel will play the aspiring knight. The Green Knight is originally a character in a 14th century Arthurian poem. Talk about going back a ways for some free IP!
Writer: David Lowery
Details: 75 pages
When I saw this in the trades, I did a double take.
“A24” and “Fantasy Epic?”
“Studio that spends less than 2 million dollars on movies” and “Most Expensive Genre Ever?”
Something wasn’t lining up.
There were other questions as well. David Lowery directing?
The guy who goes off and shoots a film in 7 days with, “A Ghost Story,” and also makes giant studio fare like Disney’s, “Pete’s Dragon.”
Now that I’m writing it, it actually makes sense. Who better to make A24’s first big budget film than the guy who’s directed both extremes? Of course, maybe it isn’t a big budget film. I have no idea. I haven’t opened the script yet. Wait, I’m opening it now. 75 pages? A micro-script? What’s going on?? Am I living in a parallel reality?? Is this Thanos’s doing? I’m predicting one heck of a review.
Gawain is the 13th century equivalent of the 31 year old unemployed manchild who lives in his mother’s basement. The only thing he’s got going for him is that he’s the King’s nephew. This allows him to spend his money on hookers and booze, waking up every morning in various back alleys. Everyone feels sorry for Gawain.
Then one day while visiting the king, a giant green knight on a giant green horse storms through the castle’s front doors. He says that anyone who can strike him down with one blow can have his really cool axe-weapon. When nobody offers, Gawain uncharacteristically yells, “I’ll do it!” He walks up, the Green Knight gets down on one knee, puts up no defense, allowing Gawain to swing away and decapitate him. Except that seconds later, the Green Knight’s headless body goes and picks up his still living head, who informs Gaiwain that he must come to his home in a year’s time.
Gawain spends the next year basking in his celebrity, drinking, and dreading his upcoming journey. When the day comes to leave, he tries to hide, but the king throws him out of the kingdom, forcing him to go. And so off Gawain goes, meeting many unique people. A thief, a ghost woman looking for her head, a battlefield of dead knights, a talking fox, a swinger couple who plays games with his head, and a group of mountain giants.
Barely alive, Gawain finally makes it to the Green Knight’s quarters. The knight tells him to kneel down, just as he did. He will now chop Gawain’s head off. Gawain freaks out. He doesn’t want to do this. He leaps up, runs out of the knight’s home, jumps on his horse, rides all the way back to his home, where people assume he’s defeated The Green Knight. However, something is off. Something about our poor Gawain isn’t right. Indeed, what Gawain doesn’t realize is that he was doomed the second he ran from the Green Knight.
This one started off clunky.
We set up that Gawain is a cowardly drunk loser. Then when The Green Knight shows up and challenges someone to swing at him, Gawain hops up and says he’ll do it. This was in no way consistent with anything he had done up to that point.
But once Gawain goes off on his journey, the story picks up considerably. One of my favorite moments was when he found an abandoned home, took a nap, then was woken up by a woman asking him to find her head, which was “in a nearby river.” Confused, he dives into the river, swims to the bottom, finds an old skull, brings it back, and is greeted with a rotten headless skeleton in a dress on the bed. We learn via a few other details that this woman was murdered by her husband, who decapitated her, threw her head in the river and left. It was one of the more haunting things I’ve read in awhile.
And there was a lot of great imagery here. The field of a frozen dead knights after a long ago battle, each of them rotting inside their armor, is a trailer image if I’ve ever read one. Or there was a moment where Gawain had been tied up and left to die by a thief. As he stands there, pondering his situation, we pan slowly around 360 degrees to the rest of the landscape, as seasons pass, and when we make it around, we see Gawain’s rotted corpse, still tied there. We then pan back the way we came, reversing the process, to the alive Gawain again. We realize the shot was him looking into the future if he didn’t find a way out of this. Quite clever.
There are also some strange choices that I don’t know what to make of. Early on, Gawain looks directly into the camera and winks. Never again is the 4th wall broken. Only in that moment. It was bizarre. And then when he stays with the swinger couple, they have a book of photographs. Yes, photographs in the 1300s. Later still, the fox who’s been following him the entire journey starts chatting with him. Talking foxes. Why not!
Looking at all of it in retrospect, the weirdness was a net positive. Lowery looks to be creating a world of uncertainty here, and he’s willing to pull in some 21st century devices to do so, even if it doesn’t completely make sense.
The real head-scratcher, though, is the ending.
I don’t know if they hadn’t figured out the whole “stories need to make sense” thing back in the 14th century. If there’s some old school fairy tale logic going on here. But I didn’t understand the climax at all. Gawain shows up to the Green Knight’s place. The Green Knight tells him to put his head down and he’s going to decapitate him……. Uh, what’s the lesson here? There doesn’t seem to be a compelling choice for our hero to make. He’s supposed to allow himself to be decapitated? Why? What does that accomplish? Does that make him “brave?” Okay, so you’re brave now. Good for you. You’re dead.
I’d get it if he was way overmatched and he still chose to fight. Then he still gains the bravery tag and has a chance to win. But to just get on your knee and let someone kill you?? I don’t understand what the logic is there. Maybe somebody can clue me in.
I bring thing up because we were just talking yesterday about giving your hero a difficult choice at the end of the movie. They get something they really want, but lose something they really want in the process. Here, he loses either way. It doesn’t make sense.
Still, this is a very imaginative and intriguing story. There’s something unquantifiable about the journey that digs into you and won’t let go. I suspect that if Lowery nails the direction, this could be a breakout indie hit. I know one thing. It’s going to make one heck of a trailer.
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[xx] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: The purest story is the hero’s journey. It is one of the easiest stories to make work because there’s always a sense of forward momentum inherent in the setup. Your character is literally trying get from point A on the map to point B. It’s still up to you to come up with interesting characters and interactions and set pieces along the way. But this structure, when done well, will always work. And this is proof of it. This story was written 700 years ago and it still works.
