Review: The King Is a Moody, and Confused, Song of Mud and Chainmail

If only the film made more of the curious tension between Timothée Chalamet’s Henry and Robert Pattinson’s dauphin.

The King
Photo: Netflix

A moody song of mud and chainmail, David Michôd’s The King twists Shakespeare’s four histories, known collectively as the Henriad, into a rather modern political fable. It’s the story of a young leader intent on rescuing his country from intractable warfare who nonetheless finds himself expanding the nation’s military footprint without doing great damage to his idealistic reputation. The film, co-written by Michôd and Joel Edgerton, doesn’t dwell on the parallels between King Henry V and Barack Obama. Intead, it shrewdly casts the former Prince Hal (Timothée Chalamet) into an avatar of millennial discontent toward power and the grisly means in which it’s exercised. He’s nonetheless seduced by its thrall.

The King doesn’t limn much conflict from Henry V’s failure to live up to his ideals. In fact, Michôd and Edgerton seem strangely oblivious to its most compelling aspects, chiefly the styling of Hal as a mid-1990s goth icon, a la Brandon Lee in The Crow, before his elevation to the throne. Chalamet’s narrow frame and innate talent for expressing sullen diffidence provide a jolt of modernity to the early scenes where England is riven by civil war and King Henry IV (a cotton-mouthed Ben Mendelsohn) sinks into paranoia and dementia. Estranged from his family, Hal cavorts with Falstaff (Edgerton), spending his nights at taverns and waking alone because Falstaff has ushered the women whom the prince beds out of their inn at sunrise.

After the deaths of his father and brother, and despite his emo rebellions, Hal assumes the role of Henry V with a mandate to pursue peace and a haircut that transforms this brooding figure into a wary warrior. His attention is soon consumed by the French, who send spies to infiltrate his circle of confidantes, and whose heir apparent, the Dauphin of France (Robert Pattinson) seems intent in taunting him into battle. By and large, the film portrays the king’s capitulation to a new battle as an act of attrition, in redundant scenes of Henry seeking the counsel of a war-hungry Archbishop (Andrew Cavill) and his Chief Justice William (Sean Harris).

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The King somehow becomes more self-serious after Henry integrates Falstaff into his advisory council, reinventing the massive gallivant into a gentle friend and self-proclaimed man of few words. “What if Hagrid but a taciturn war hero?” appears to be the pitch for Edgerton’s Falstaff, a character who’s emblematic of the film’s confused identity. Is Henry a master tactician or a peacenik who’s in far over his head? This question is cast aside abruptly when the king declares war on France after an attack on Henry’s pride at the hands of the dauphin. This hasty decision is the only moment where The King questions Henry’s ego, and the scene undermines the film’s outsized attention to tedious backroom negotiations.

Though the film fails to explore Henry’s psychology, Chalamet effectively conveys the king’s efforts to perform leadership and charisma: The King’s version of the St. Crispin’s Day speech takes place on a muddy battlefield where Henry appears diminutive but persuasively motivates his troops into a potentially hopeless battle. If only the film made more of the curious tension between Henry and the dauphin, who Pattinson portrays as a gleeful imp who looks like he’s been airlifted out of Neil Jordan’s Interview with a Vampire. Instead, the two are sent into a scrum of armored bodies drowning one another in puddles and stabbing heedlessly. The battle is, like too much of The King, a slog of desaturated colors and endless slow motion that means to treat war as a brutal, meaningless affair, all the while capturing the action with a reverent grandeur that suggests there’s no other realm where heroes can be made.

Score: 
 Cast: Timothée Chalamet, Joel Edgerton, Sean Harris, Ben Mendelsohn, Robert Pattinson, Andrew Cavill, Lily-Rose Depp  Director: David Michôd  Screenwriter: David Michôd, Joel Edgerton  Distributor: Netflix  Running Time: 133 min  Rating: R  Year: 2019  Buy: Soundtrack

Christopher Gray

Christopher Gray is a film programmer at the Portland Museum of Art in Maine. His writing has also appeared in Tiny Mix Tapes.

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