FILMS OF THE MONTH
54 | Sight&Sound | November 2019
Reviewed by John Bleasdale
The first speech of William Shakespeare’s Henry V
immediately confesses to a sense of inadequacy
before the task. “O for a muse of fire!” the chorus
pleads, hoping to compensate for the poor means
- “this unworthy scaffold” – available to the
players to recreate a founding moment in the
modern English monarchy. Shakespeare’s
audience in 1599 are encouraged to participate,
to use their imaginations, and in so doing create
out of thin air a national myth and a moment of
English greatness. It is an appeal poignantly
audible in Laurence Olivier’s cinematic version
in 1944. As with Tinkerbell’s fate in Peter Pan, if
we all believe hard enough, the play will work,
the monarchy will have meaning and the
English will triumph in Europe against all odds.
Australian director David Michôd’s The King
has no apologetic prologue, and makes no
pleas for us to use our imaginations – “O for a
bigger budget!” After all, he has Netflix. There
is no mention of Shakespeare in the credits,
and Michôd and Joel Edgerton’s script ditches
iambic pentameter for a modern version of
old-world argot, reminiscent of Game of Thrones
(though they do hang on to Sir John Falstaff,
a Shakespearean invention). As for notions of
English greatness and monarchy, the film has a
refreshingly irreverent take. Even in the casting,
the biggest English star Robert Pattinson is
playing the French villain, the Dauphin; and the
national icon of Henry V is played by Timothée
Chalamet, a New Yorker with a French passport.
But, more seriously, the notion of kingship
and power is not given the critical support
that Shakespeare supplies, the poetry, and is
instead portrayed as illegitimate and brutal.
The brutality is evident from the very start.
Following a title card placing us vaguely at “the
beginning of the 15th century” (in reality 1402),
we open on the aftermath of a battle, where
the wounded are being routinely murdered
by the victors. Despite this triumph, Henry IV
(Ben Mendelsohn) is haggling with his allies
over prisoners, and one ally – the young and
temperamental Henry ‘Hotspur’ Percy (Tom
Glynn-Carney) – is already threatening further
rebellion. Mendelsohn plays the fading monarch
as a long-haired louche rather than the guilt-
ridden ascetic of Shakespeare. And yet he is also
a tyrant, of dubious legitimacy, unloved and
holding on to power with paranoid violence.
This places him in stark contrast to his son
Prince Hal, played with resolute seriousness by
Chalamet, an actor who has already accrued
considerable credit with his star turn in Luca
Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name (2017). We
first meet Hal waking from a night of booze in
Eastcheap, where he regularly carouses with
Falstaff (Edgerton), an older, disreputable knight
and close friend. Hal’s hedonism, however, is
framed as an act of despairing rebellion against
his father’s reign. A pacifist of sorts, Hal speaks out
against the king’s warmongering, inspired by
Falstaff’s unromantic accounts of battle.
Edgerton’s Falstaff is a radical reworking of
Paradoxically, it is Hal’s horror of bloodshed
that leads him to offer to fight Hotspur – who has
now rebelled in earnest – in individual combat
rather than see their two armies clash. The fight
is an inelegant armoured ruck, rounded off with
a stabbing. There is little chivalry to be seen. It
is Hal’s first blood and his first compromise. His
Shakespeare’s character. No longer the cowardly
braggart and drunkard so brilliantly played by
Orson Welles in Chimes at Midnight (1965), he’s
more a bloke than a rogue, war-weary rather than
a coward, and his experience of the sharp end of
war gives the young Prince of Wales a healthy
distaste for violence. At least initially.
The game’s afoot: Timothée Chalamet as Henry V in David Michôd’s historical tale
Director David Michôd
James Mottram At what point did you
think of departing from the Shakespeare
version of the tale? Was it early on?
David Michôd Yes, both on a formal level
and a thematic level. Joel [Edgerton] and
I both separately reread the plays and I
was reminded of the fact that as much I
love Shakespeare – I love the verse, I love
unpicking the puzzle of it – I’m aware the
whole time that I’m reading something
that was written for an Elizabethan stage,
to be presented to an audience, in a way
that often, in my experience, tends to make
cinema adaptations quite stilted.
JM Did you see The King as
growing out of your earlier
studies of masculinity in
films like Animal Kingdom
and War Machine?
DM All of my movies are
about men who are either
pathologically deluded or
are just naive and come
to realise that they’re wrong. For Joel and I, the
version of the story of Henry V that was most
interesting was the one that was about a well-
intentioned young man given an enormous
amount of responsibility and then
being consumed by the machinations
of the institution around him.
JM How did you approach
the film’s visual style?
DM You get into this beautiful
complex dance with your director of
photography, production designer and
costume designer that are all about
this constant exchange
of images. I knew I
wanted this to feel
raw and medieval.
I didn’t want it to
be over-lit. But
nonetheless,
I wanted it to
feel a little
bit alien.
Q&A David Michôd, director
The King
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