The King [2019]

Welcome back to My Year of Shakespeare. This week we are watching 2019's The King.

Let me start by saying a pair of things that I would usually find mutually exclusive: One: I did not like this movie. Two: I think this movie was well made. I think that in a vacuum, if Shakespeare didn't exist, if I hadn't just come off of The Hollow Crown doing this better, if I-in-my-role-as-the-viewer were unaware of the concept of "ipad face", I would think this movie rips. Unfortunately, none of those things are, so I am left to articulate why I did not enjoy this, which truly boils down to "I went into this with expectations that were not met".

This movie has the dubious distinction of having the first Timothee Chalamet performance I've ever bounced off of. I think his portrayal had three modes; the first is aping the Hiddleston performance of Hal from The Hollow Crown. Chalamet clearly does his homework, but watching this in such close succession, it was really clear when he was borrowing from tHC. The second mode was looksmaxxing stocism memes. My god I hate these things. It does not demean your manhood to emote. It does not give away the game. It clues people in on how to read your interiority, which gives them a way to access empathic means for communicating with you. The third is the "gen z stare". I don't think generational discourse is terribly useful, but that does not mean it doesn't exist.

Chalamet's performance never lets the viewer in; he is Poochie the King. Designed to be "cool" and "just" and not "understandable" means he can only ever be aesthetically apeable, which I guess what the movie is going for.

Credit where it's due, I found Joel Edgerton's Falstaff to be an actually enjoyable character. Falstaff sort of stands in for a teacher of morality here — he survives the two former plays and doesn't get denounced by Hal, which is a large diversion from the plays and really undermines 2 Henry IV (and makes sense for its scarce inclusion here). There's a real bounty for cherry picking aspects of Falstaff here — no holding court, no claiming the kill for Hotspur, the only time in which this Falstaff would be thought fat would've been in the 90s-00s "heroin chic" era, he's got just a normal body; his stolen valor and venal nature, I'd consider them critical to the character. Falstaff doesn't just teach Hal morality and responsibility, he teaches him that the hoi polloi is just as distractable and venal and looking to escape their debtors as the nobles are and they just have different means to do it. To erase that for more of a "robin hood-like" figure of moral virtue is a deliberate perversion of the source material, in a way that makes The King parallel the second tetralogy in a similar way that Game of Thrones parallels the first tetralogy.

Pattinson is extremely fun in this. You can basically see the bite marks he left on the scenery. I think, between bigger projects, he should take more goofy bit roles.

Visually, I think this film looks great. I think the Agincourt sequence being so muddy and drawn out is great. I think the wikipedians taking issue with there not being pilings/caltrops to assist in defending against the French Cavalry are being ludicrous.

That said, they fucked up the St Crispin's Day speech. If you had anyone remotely shakespeare-knowledgable and asked them for an idiom that could be attributed to the Henry V play, they'd very likely come up with "Band of Brothers" (due in no small part to the television show); for that to be omitted feels like an oversight.

Ultimately, I think this picture is useful for a writing series like this or to kill two and half hours; I don't think it was good for building an understanding of what Shakespeare was trying to do with the second tetralogy. If you want to watch a good Joel Edgerton movie, check out Train Dreams.

Next Week, we are going to watch "Chimes at Midnight" (1966), get some Orson Welles in our life. After that:

• November 8 - My Own Private Idaho (1991)
• November 15 - Henry V (1989)
• November 22 - The Black Adder [series one] (1983)
• November 29 - The Goodbye Girl (1977) & Looking For Richard (1996)

I did add one to the list with Looking For Richard — I got word that The Goodbye Girl is maybe only incidentally Shakespearean so we're going to look at Richard III with Al Pacino.

Thank you for reading along with My Year of Shakespeare.