‘The King’ Review: Once More Unto the Breach (but Why?)
In this period drama, Timothée Chalamet plays the prince who becomes King Henry V (with little help from Shakespeare).
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So, uh, let’s do this thing: Timothée Chalamet plays Henry-Hal in “The King,” which draws from the Henry plays.Credit...Netflix
By Manohla Dargis
Oct. 10, 2019
The KingDirected by David Michôd
Biography, Drama, History, Romance, WarR
2h 20m
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Orson Welles once said that “every single way of playing and staging Shakespeare — as long as the way is effective — is right.” It’s hard to know if Welles would have been as kindly disposed to an effort like “The King.” Directed by David Michôd, the movie is a churn of mud and blood that draws from the Henry plays, history and, in its storytelling approach, Hollywood. In a miscalculated bid at relevancy, it also ditches Shakespeare’s poetry and prose for a generic hero’s journey, one that leans hard on Timothée Chalamet’s droopy charisma as the dissolute prince turned warrior-king.
The Henry plays have been adapted to the screen before, including Welles’s dazzling “Chimes at Midnight” (he plays Falstaff) and Gus Van Sant’s liberal appropriation (or bowdlerization) for “My Own Private Idaho.” Straighter in every sense than either, “The King” sets the story on parallel tracks that eventually converge in the royal court. There, King Henry IV (Ben Mendelsohn, making the showy most of a minor role) rules over the usual retinue of toadying courtiers while waging endless war. A greasy, festering mess, he voices displeasure with the young Henry, a.k.a. Hal, preferring the belligerent hero turned rebel, Hotspur (a vibrant Tom Glynn-Carney).
Meanwhile back at the inn, Hal and Falstaff (Joel Edgerton) carouse amid a flurry of murky superimposed images. Like much in this movie, Falstaff is at once familiar and scarcely recognizable. He’s more padded than portly and nowhere near the hulk who, in “Henry IV, Part I,” Hal mocks as “this horseback-breaker, this huge hill of flesh.” (That Falstaff gives as good as he gets, calling Hal a “bull’s pizzle,” among other insults.) With a dark rather than snowy beard, Edgerton’s Falstaff also registers as far younger yet less forceful than Shakespeare’s invention, suggesting that someone here worried that too much sagging flesh and adult wit would turn off young viewers.
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Every era gets its own Shakespeare movies, which invariably hold a mirror up to the audience. In Laurence Olivier’s 1944 film of “Henry V,” the St. Crispin’s Day speech is directed at a country fighting Hitler. Decades later, during the Vietnam War, Welles turned the Henry plays into “Chimes at Midnight,” making Falstaff the story’s fulcrum and stripping Henry’s battle against the French at Agincourt down to a harrowing, unheroic struggle. For its part, “The King” focuses on Hal-Henry, turning his evolution into a predictable journey into self-awareness, with brooding looks and noble intentions. And while this Henry speaks of peace, the filmmakers speak louder by turning Agincourt into their showstopper.
“The King” doesn’t preface the battle with the St. Crispin’s Day speech — “we happy few, we band of brothers” — one of Shakespeare’s most soaring and frequently bastardized orations. Instead Michôd and Edgerton, who share script credit, furnish Henry with a big-game pep talk that Chalamet delivers at top volume while he walks among his men, stoking nationalist fires by asking them to kill and think of England. The fight is well staged and at least in its emphasis on the human toll of war — the panting, clanging misery of men in armor dying in one another’s grip — owes a stronger debt to Welles than to Olivier’s antiseptic, politically expedient vision.
Chalamet is appealing (bowl haircut or no), but also routinely outperformed by a cast that includes the reliably strong Sean Harris as one of Henry’s advisers. This scarcely seems Chalamet’s fault, but rather a deeper problem of intent. Michôd has a gift for screen violence and is generally good with actors, yet time and again your attention drifts from Hal-Henry to the story’s edges, where the supporting actors nibble at their tasty bits. What Michôd never manages to make clear is what we are to make of this version’s nationalism, its glorification of war, its ambivalence toward corrupting power and its selective, finally misguided attempt to brush off Shakespeare.
The King
Rated R for ye olde carnage. Running time: 2 hours 13 minutes.
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DirectorDavid Michôd
WritersJoel Edgerton, David Michôd
StarsRobert Pattinson, Timothée Chalamet, Ben Mendelsohn, Joel Edgerton, Dean-Charles Chapman
RatingR
Running Time2h 20m
GenresBiography, Drama, History, Romance, War
Movie data powered by IMDb.com
Manohla Dargis has been the co-chief film critic since 2004. She started writing about movies professionally in 1987 while earning her M.A. in cinema studies at New York University, and her work has been anthologized in several books. More about Manohla Dargis
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