The King (2019) - Movie Review

There’s something off about this movie. The latest from Aussie director David Michôd is an adaptation of the Henriad, the classic canon of Shakespearean works focusing on King Henry IV and V… and yet, it is a remarkably loose adaptation. Written by Michôd and Joel Edgerton, you’d have to strain to hear any of the original prose in here. Even considering the lengthy history of adaptations of the Bard, including Ophelia from earlier this year, this seems like a backwards move. Why would you bother adapting a work of fiction, which itself is based on historical fact, and leave behind the writing that is the main reason why Shakespeare’s work survives to the present day? Well, thankfully, there are quite a few answers to that, and all things considered, I think these guys took the right approach.

For one, by cutting out the extensive monologues and soliloquies, the story itself not only becomes more forceful and to-the-point, it ends up feeling like a better accompaniment to a narrative all about the ugliness of war and the egotistical woes of kingship. What it lacks in prettiness, it makes up for in bluntness, aided by how low-flash and grimy the fight scenes turn out, and when the actors is called upon to argue, it creates some real punch.

And on that same note of the actors, one of the other reasons why this film directly adapts the plays seems to be that, if it stuck to the historic record, they’d have to leave out Falstaff, a Shakespearean original and the kind of performance potential that can make careers. It made for one of Orson Welles’ greatest roles in Chimes At Midnight, another film that merged several plays together into a single story, and it makes for one of Edgerton’s better performances to date. Going for a similar father-son relationship between Falstaff and the titular King, this one mainly forgoes the air of betrayal and nepotist ultimatum for something with more solidarity, showing Falstaff as a roguish knight who becomes one of the few people King Henry can actually trust in his own court.

But as fun as he is all on his own, I have to get into everyone else because this is a real beauty of a cast. Ben Mendelsohn is once again perfectly cast as the villainous Henry IV, Sean Harris as Henry V’s advisor Gascoigne is the linchpin in the film’s most powerful moments, Tom Glynn-Carney’s early role as Hotspur is well-handled, Lily-Rose Depp makes for a surprisingly good Catherine, adding major emotional oomph to the film’s finale, and Robert Pattinson is an absolute delight as The Dauphin. Saying his performance here is good shouldn’t be controversial to those who have seen his work outside of the Twilight series, but his delivery here is almost Wiseauvian in how mind-fraggingly odd it is, and yet it fits the role perfectly.

Around that central cast and a solid treatment of the source material, Michôd and DOP Adam Arkapaw (who has already seen success with Shakespeare with his work on Justin Kurzel’s Macbeth) create a pretty miserable-looking film. But it’s a miserable look that feels warranted when put against a story so ensconced in warfare, and one that only makes Henry V’s arc that much more powerful. Maybe it’s because of the great cliché that political leaders prefer to let everyone else fight their battles, but seeing a leader like Timothée Chalamet’s monarch fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with his army, even putting his own life on the line in one-on-one combat to spare that same army… it’s really damn refreshing to see, and it only continues Chalamet’s trajectory as an indie darling.

 

I’ll admit that this doesn’t have the vibrant analysis of the material that was in Macbeth, or even the breadth of artistic influences found in Ophelia, but this has more than enough of its own to keep it going. As a historic war flick, its population of capital acting talent and an intent to cut out the purple bullshit and make its point perfectly clear still makes for a nicely visceral feature, as well as one of the higher points for most of the actors and production hands involved.