Tag: David Lowery

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The Green Knight

The Green Knight, played by Ralph Ineson.

King Arthur movies rise and fall like ancient kings in history books. You usually know what to expect: valiancy, swordplay, armor fetishism, forbidden courtly romance, etc. But David Lowery’s The Green Knight is a different breed of fairy tale. 

The closest comparison is Excalibur, director John Boorman’s 1981 labor of love. Excalibur was nothing like the turgid Knights of the Round Table from the ’50s or the musical Camelot from the ’60s. It was an attempt to tell a story of King Arthur in a way that the original audience would have understood. Sure, the “original audience” was made up of medieval Christian fanatics imposing their performative masculinity onto stories of a Romano-British warlord, and if you showed them a moving picture rife with gratuitous nudity, they would have burned you for witchcraft, but that didn’t stop Boorman. Excalibur is a visual feast of verdant Irish landscapes and shiny armored men, featuring an all-time great battle sequence filmed in a real medieval castle. But unless you watch it a few times and develop a working knowledge of Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, it’s pretty hard to follow.

Dev Patel is Gawain, King Arthur’s nephew, who faces coming-of-age and a challenge set forth by the Green Knight.

The Green Knight signals it’s coming from a similar place with the title card, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: A filmed adaptation of the chivalric romance by Anonymous.” When we meet Gawain (Dev Patel), Arthur’s nephew is waking up in a brothel next to Essel (Alicia Vikander), a commoner. It’s Christmas, so he has to sober up and go to dinner with King Arthur (Sean Harris) and Guinevere (Kate Dickie). When his uncle asks him for a story of his exploits, Gawain admits he has never really done anything. That’s when a mysterious figure on horseback charges into Camelot. The Green Knight (Ralph Ineson) delivers a challenge. Any of the brave knights of the Round Table filling their bellies with figgy pudding can come take a free swing at him, but next Christmas, said knight must be willing to journey to the Green Chapel and submit to exactly the same wound he inflicts. Since the Green Knight is 8 feet tall, apparently made out of living wood, and wielding a magic axe, the knights are reluctant to take up his challenge. Gawain, needing stories to tell, volunteers. When Arthur loans him Excalibur, Gawain has an idea: If he cuts off the Green Knight’s head, he won’t have to worry about keeping his end of the bargain! But Gawain’s game theory comes undone when the Green Knight calmly picks up his severed head and says, “See you next year, sucker!” It’s all been a magic test of the future king’s capacity for mercy, and Gawain has failed the pop quiz. 

Failure will be a recurring theme for our hero. The next Christmas season, he sets out alone to face decapitation. On the way, he is subject to a series of tests and temptations which, more often than not, he whiffs. Do you see Lancelot getting jumped by bandits and tied to a tree, or accidentally eating magic mushrooms while lost in the forest? 

The Green Knight unfolds like a tapestry, as Lowery and cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo serve up one luscious image after another. The episodic story is held together, to the extent that it is, by Dev Patel’s charismatic performance as a callow, thick-headed youth being dragged kicking and screaming into manhood. 

Personally, I loved The Green Knight for its uncompromising vision and flights of downright weirdness, but I realize it’s not for everyone. If you’re looking for Conan the Barbarian-style, hack-and-slash action, you’ll be disappointed. The film has bawdy moments, but there’s no Game of Thrones-style exploitation. There’s humor in Gawain’s plight, but not the Peter Jackson, dwarf-tossing kind. Lowery channels Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal and, in a stunning, wordless climax, Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ. I found Lowery’s deliberate pacing hypnotic, but as my wife said, “There’s a lot of gazing.” My advice is, don’t worry too much about the intricacies of chivalry and magic. To get on The Green Knight’s wavelength, just sit back and let the mists of Avalon wash over you.

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Film Features Film/TV

The Old Man And The Gun

It’s always hard to know when to quit. We as a society put all the emphasis on the skills it takes to be successful and climb the ladder in your chosen field, but understanding when you’ve reached the point of diminishing returns is equally important. You frequently see it in sports, from Jerry Rice limping through his 20th season to Michael Jordon’s stint with the Washington Wizards. Overstaying your welcome happens all the time in the arts, too, as was driven home to me recently when, seized by Halloween spirit, I suffered through Abbot and Costello Meet the Mummy. Oy.

The trick is to go out, if not at the top of your game, at least when your chops are still sharp. One guy who was able to do just that was Forrest Tucker. If they gave out Crime Academy Awards, Tucker would surely get a lifetime achievement trophy. Between his 15th birthday and his death in 2004 at age 83, Tucker robbed more than $4 million from banks. Of course, they do give a lifetime achievement award for crime: Life in prison. But that was no deterrent to Tucker, who claimed to have escaped from prison “18 times successfully and 12 times unsuccessfully.” San Quinten, Alcatraz, Folsom — name a famous clink and Tucker probably busted out of it. The final time he was arrested at age 79, he was four banks deep into a crime spree as the “Gentleman Bandit,” so I think it’s safe to say that Tucker “retired” while his game was still tight.

Robert Redford is a national treasure. His list of awards stemming from his film career is so long, it has its own independent Wikipedia page. In the late ’70s, Redford was the first chairman of the Sundance Film Festival, named after Redford’s character in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. When Time magazine recently put him on their list of the most powerful people in the world, they called him the father of independent film.

Robert Redford (above) rides one last time as Forrest Tucker in The Old Man & the Gun.

Since it was the role of an unrepentant bank robber that propelled Redford to superstardom, it’s fitting that the 82-year-old Redford decided to hang up his filmmaking spurs portraying Forrest Tucker. The Old Man & the Gun is based on a 2003 New Yorker article by writer David Grann detailing Tucker’s exploits. It’s written for the screen and directed by David Lowery, whose breakthrough film Ain’t Them Bodies Saints gained international attention at Sundance 2013.

Lowery, who had the unenviable task of directing someone who has both a Best Director and Best Picture Oscar, is at the top of his game. The Old Man & the Gun is about endings, but it is much more playful and hopeful than Lowery’s emotionally devastating A Ghost Story. Lowery brings on his regular collaborator Casey Affleck as John Hunt, Tucker’s police detective nemesis. Much of Redford’s portrayal of Tucker is defined by this relationship. Hunt regards Tucker as a criminal and a threat, but with grudging admiration for his tradecraft. Tucker, on the other hand, thinks of Hunt as a work colleague and something of a chum. There’s a sense that some of the robber’s more daring jobs are done just to impress the cops.

Tom Waits

The rest of the cast is uniformly incredible. I envision Redford, who has a producer credit, picking up the phone one morning to ask Sissy Spacek if she would like to be his love interest. Who in their right mind is going to say no to that? Lowery gives Spacek more room to maneuver than she’s had in years, so she and Redford absolutely crackle together in scene after scene. Rounding out Tucker’s Over the Hill Gang are, amazingly enough, Tom Waits and Danny Glover. Lowery gives Waits a meandering monologue about why he hates Christmas, and just lets the camera roll uninterrupted while the gravelly voiced singer casts his spell.

Redford, clearly having a ball, has that old, mischievous twinkle in his eye from The Sting. When he calms a nervous bank teller mid-robbery by saying “You’re doing great,” you’ll wish he would be there to encourage you when your life hits a tough spot. The spirit behind his effortless, inspired performance is best summed up when Tucker says to his lawyer, “I guess when you find something you love, you keep at it.”

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A Ghost Story

Telling a horror story from the point of view of the monster is a time honored method that has produced good results. Think of the endless slate of vampire stories we’ve seen that used this trick, beginning with Ann Rice’s Interview With The Vampire and including the much lamented Twilight saga. Stop motion animation legend Ray Harryhausen once said that his films were “shrines to the monster”. The best movie monsters, like King Kong or The Creature From The Black Lagoon, aren’t evil, per se, but innocent, untamed, and backed into a corner.

David Lowery’s new film, A Ghost Story, makes the monster the protagonist. The big question it puts forward is, what does a haunted house look like to a ghost doing the haunting? Lowery’s answer is: It looks pretty darn sad.

It’s not fair to Lowery or the film to reduce it to the terms of genre, which it resembles only superficially. But it does serve to highlight the depth of Lowery’s achievement. A Ghost Story is not a Paranormal Activity parade of jump scares and spooky sound effects. It is, instead, a meditation on deep time, on the impermanence of all things that seem permanent, and the recurring cycles of human experience that ultimately connect us all.

Our two nameless protagonists are Casey Affleck, a musician struggling to write the perfect song, and Rooney Mara as his wife, a young professional paying the couple’s bills. Like any couple, they have their ups and downs, but they seem genuinely happy with each other. Rooney wants to move out of their cozy but aging suburban home for something nicer, but Casey wants to stay. He feels a sentimental attachment to the old place where they had so many great memories. But before their conflict can be resolved, Casey dies suddenly, leaving Rooney on her own.

To his presumed shock, Casey comes back as a ghost. And we’re not talking about a CGI-heavy Pirates of the Caribbean ghost. Affleck spends the bulk of the movie under a long sheet with eyes holes cut out of it. That’s the kind of conceit that could either instantly crash and burn or elevate the project. In this case, it is the latter.

Casey’s ghost is trapped in the house he didn’t want to leave. He watches his wife intently until she moves on. Then, he watches the long, long years roll by as new families move in, live their lives, and leave.
Stuck under the sheet, Affleck becomes a figure model, little more than a prop for the rest of the film to revolve around. But it’s brilliant and poignant. Mara does most of the dramatic heavy lifting, including a virtuosic performance in an excruciating, long scene in the kitchen that has been dividing critics since A Ghost Story’s Sundance debut. Cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo proves a perfect fit for Lowery’s lyrical vision. Emotionally, A Ghost Story is a raw and unguarded. It’s only 92 minutes long, but it’s an extremely intense viewing experience that will stick with you (dare I say, haunt you?) long after the sheet drops.

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Film Features Film/TV

Pete’s Dragon

If there’s a lesson to be learned from the plague of remakes, it’s this: You’re better off remaking a mediocre movie than remaking a good movie. Craig Brewer’s 2011 remake of Footloose was a better movie than the 1984 original in all respects except one: It lacked Kevin Bacon.

Like Brewer, director David Lowery came from the indie scene, editing Shane Carruth’s groundbreaking sci-fi film Upstream Color and scoring a Sundance hit with his 2013 Ain’t Them Bodies Saints. His assignment from Disney was a remake of the not-very-fondly-recalled 1977 Pete’s Dragon. The original was made during the dark times for the House of Mouse when the animation department was depleted and the studio was trying to coast along on low-budget, live-action kids films like Escape to Witch Mountain.

Disney’s comforting remake is a tale of a boy and his giant, shaggy, green dragon.

Pete’s Dragon combined the animated dragon with live action Helen Reddy and Mickey Rooney, but since it was released the same year as Star Wars, it dazzled exactly no one. Instead of the goofy, slapstick dragon of 1977, Elliot the dragon looks more like a big, shaggy family dog than Smaug. His relationship with the orphan Pete (Oakes Fegley) is kind of like Room in the woods: content, but precarious. The feral Pete is discovered by Natalie (Oona Laurence), the daughter of lumber mill owner Jack (Wes Bentley), and forest ranger Grace (Bryce Dallas Howard) when a logging crew advances into the woods, putting Pete and his dragon in peril.

Unlike in The Jungle Book, it turns out to be a good idea to take out the songs from a former musical. Lowery plays the story like the kind of straightforward indie drama he cut his teeth on, and the result is something like E.T. in the Pacific Northwest, lens flares and all. The actors all fare reasonably well, with the most welcome presence being Robert Redford as Grace’s father, Mr. Meacham, one of the few people to ever actually see the dragon before Pete came along. Redford is as effortless and comforting in the role as a cozy old quilt, encapsulating the tone that makes Pete’s Dragon so agreeable.